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THE GREEN HAT

THE GREEN HAT

A Romance for a Few People

by

MICHAEL ARLEN

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.

GLASGOW SYDNEY AUCKLAND

Copyright

First Impression,

June T024

Second „

June 1924

Third

June 1924

Fourth „

July 1924

Fifth

July 1924

Sixth

August 10 2 4

Seventh ,,

August 1924

Eighth „

August 1924

Ninth

September 1924

Tenth „

October 1924

Eleventh „

Novembei 1924

Twelfth ,,

May 1925

Thirteenth ,,

June 1925

Fourteenth ,

November, 4925

Fifteenth „

April, 1926

Sixteenth „

June, 1926

Seventeenth.,

August, 1926

Printed in Great Britain

TO

F. M. ATKINSON, Esquire

CONTENTS

Chapter One :

The Green Hat

Page

I

Chapter T wo :

The Cavalier of Low Creatures

49

Chapter Three :

For Purity !

70

Chapter Four :

Aphrodite

102

Chapter Five :

The Dark Letter

138

Chapter Six :

The Red Lights

159

Chapter Seven :

For Venice /

195

Chapter Eight :

Piqure du Coeur

220

Chapter Nine :

Talking of Hats

236

Chapter Ten :

The Fall of the Emerald

252

The Last Chapter :

' St George for England l

281

vii

CHAPTER ONE

The Green Hat
I

has occurred to the writer to call this
unimportant history The Green Hat
because a green hat was the first thing
about her that he saw : as also it
was, in a way, the last thing about her
that he saw. It was bright green, of a sort of felt,
and bravely worn : being, no doubt, one of those
that women who have many hats affect pour le
sport .

I saw it for the first time (writes the Author) on
the eve of my removal from one residence in
London to another; although when I say residence
I mean that i was, by the grace of God and at the
impulse of my own temerity, removing to somewhat
more habitable premises nearby from two rooms
and a bathroom above a mean lane in a place called
Shepherd's Market. Not that our lane hadn't
attractions of its own to offer. Our lane was one
in which many improbable things were wont to
happen, but it somehow seemed inevitable that
such things should happen there. But maybe I
had better select a few of these things, that you
may know the sort of lane ours was. I have seen
men arrested there, and I have seen a heavy con-
stable worsted in a fight with a little Jew* pick-
pocket, who was for some time responsible lor a

x

THE GREEN HAT

z

rag-shop in our lane. I have seen two butlers
fighting in our lane. I have seen a very old noble-
man woo a flower-girl in our lane, but whether or
not she ever favoured his suit our lane had no
means of telling. One night I fell over the body
of a woman lying in the blood of a broken head,
and in our lane by night policemen solace themselves
by smoking cigarettes into the crowns of their
helmets, while cats, 1 must tell you, will never
cease to sport together all about it.

But it was by day that our lane attained to any
real interest for a student of such things, for then
it was sacred to the activities of a hearty-looking
man in a brown bowler-hat, who with one hand
would WTite interminably in a small book, while
with the other he dealt with passing men in slips
of paper known to the law as “ betting-slips. ” As
partner to the hearty-looking man — we are, I
venture to say, already embarked on our tale, for
these gentlemen will make a faint devil's chorus
for more spacious happenings — was a tall, wizened
man who wore a check cap and had hair growing
out of his ears. This man would stand at one end
of the lane and now and then say, “ Oi 1 " When
he had said “ Oi I " he would light a cigarette,
while the hearty-looking man would run heavily
round our end of the lane, for “ Oi ! " meant that
the law was after him. When the law had gone
he would come back wiping his mouth, and jokes
were exchanged with the butcher and the fish-
monger ; but when the law really wanted him,
say twice a year, a posse of policemen would
simultaneously rush both ends of our lane, and
the hearty-looking man was mulcted in a fine not
exceeding so much and was back again the next
morning within a yard of my door. Among his

THE GREEN HAT

3

most persistent admirers was a little bent old
man with blood-shot eyes and a twitching mouth,
who was a window-cleaner without a Union, which
meant that he would clean a window for three-
pence and want no tip. He liked me, and used to
give me racing information, but I never won
anything.

Now the first thing to do is to clear the ground
as quickly as possible for the coming of the green
hat, for Mr. H. G. Wells says that there is no
money to be made out of any book that cannot
bring a woman in within the first few thousand
words. But in setting the scene in Shepherd's
Market we have evaded the necessity for any
“ writing-up ” of atmosphere, for that place has
an atmosphere quite impossible to convey in a
book, unless, of course, you were to take the book
to Shepherd's Market and leave it in our lane for
a few days in nice warm weather. Shepherd's
Market is, in fine, a collection of lively odours
bounded on the north side by Curzon Street, on
the south by Piccadilly, on the west by Hertford
Street, and on the east by Half-Moon Street ; and
rejoices, therefore, in the polite direction of May-
fair, as you will see printed on the notepaper of
any of its residents. A flower-shop which was
opened in our lane lived for only six months, and
that in spite of the gardenia gallantly affected by
the old nobleman from Curzon Street every day.
I, after having lived there for six years, was (by the
grace of God) leaving on the morrow.

It is late, after midnight, when the tale begins.

I had been that evening to a party ; for that is
now the name that folks give to a dance, — I am
not sure why. In America, I believe, one doesn't
even give a party, one just throws a party, but as

4

THE GREEN HAT

to this party I am telling of, it had, with that
infallible sense of direction peculiar to parties,
whether given or thrown, taken a man by the
nerves at the back ;>f his head and had hurled
him into a deep pit. And it was as one encom-
passed by that pit, deep as the playground of the
seven devils, dark as the very dungeons of gaiety,
that I found myself back in my flat above the mean
lane. It would be the last night I would ever
spend in that flat, and I was so glad. The book-
shelves had already been taken away, and books
littered the floor, books and pictures and what-nots
crowded the gate-leg table, while the ottoman
with its soiled Chinese yellow cover was a shambles
of whatever you will find in a bachelor's flat
if you begin to clean out the drawers. The
bedroom, however, was still ordered for human
habitation.

Now I had no sooner cast my hat on the bed
than the bell rang. It was one of those infernal
things you pull at, so that they may go on clanging
for ever, and as it clanged I wondered, I am afraid
ungraciously, who it could be. Could it, I wondered,
be anyone for Gerald March, who lived in the flat
above mine ? But no one, I told myself, has called
on Gerald March within the memory of man, for
that man discourages callers, that man knows how
to discourage callers.

I had no hope m pretending not to be at home,
for my lights were plain to see from our lane. And
in my mind's eye I saw the hearty face of the
acquaintance at the door, and with my mind's
ear I heard the hearty greeting that dropped
from his parasitical and thirsty lips. He had
seen my light, that man, as he went his way home
from some party even more pestilential than the

THE GREEN HAT

5

one which had sent me home stricken ; and he
would fain drink a glass with me, after the fashion
of pests of the night, that are hearty with the
weary and thirsty with the unwary.

I could, however, always order my privacy
without seeming too unfriendly by looking down
from my bedroom window, for whereas the windows
of my sitting-room faced the public-bar of The
Leather Butler and an angle of the offices of the
Duke of Marlborough's fine house, from my bed-
room window I had a clear prospect of our lane.
Of pests, however, there was neither sight nor
sign; nor of cats, nor of men, nor of any low and
usual thing; only, under the lamp at the Sheep
Street end of our lane, a long, low, yellow car
which shone like a battle-chariot. It was empty.

Now I am of those who are affected by motor-
cars : their lines thrill me, the harmony of their
colour touches me, a gallant device wins my earnest
admiration so that, walking along Piccadilly, I
will distress my mind by being a partisan of this
one, a despiser of that one. Nor am I to be won
by any cheap thing, no matter how brave-seeming
it may be to the eye, how admirable in endurance ;
but I am to be won only by the simple lines, the
severe and menacing aspect, of the aces among
motor-cars ; for economy hath charms, but not
to the eye. This car charmed the eye. Like a
huge yellow insect that had dropped to earth from
a butterfly civilisation, this car, gallant and suave,
rested in the lowly silence of the Shepherd's Market
night. Open as a yacht, it wore a great shining
bonnet, and flying over the crest of this great bonnet,
as though in proud flight over the heads of scores
of phantom horses, was that silver stork by which
the gentle may be pleased to know that they

6

THE GREEN HAT

have just escaped death beneath the wheels of a
Hispano-Suiza car, as supplied to His Most Catholic
Majesty.

Downwards to my door I looked, and there was
a green hat before my door. The light from the
one lamp in Sheep Street fell about it, and that
was how I saw that it was a green hat, of a sort of
felt, and bravely worn : being, no doubt, one of
those that women who have many hats affect
pour le sport.

THE GREEN HAT

7

2

" Do you know if Mr. March is in?" asked the
voice of the green hat. But I could not see her face
for the shadow of the brim, for it was a piratical
brim, such as might very possibly defy the burn-
ing suns of El Dorado.

I said I was not sure. I was very surprised — a
caller for Gerald March ! “ If we look up," I said,

" we can see by his lights if he is in." And I
stepped out into the lane, and the green hat and
I stared up at the topmost windows of the grubby
little house.

“ There's no light there ," she said. " I suppose
the light below is yours ..."

“ There is," 1 said, “ but it's very faint. He's
in all right."

Still she looked up, thoughtfully. She was tall,
not very tall, but as tall as becomes a woman.
Her hair, in the shadow of her hat, may have been
any colour, but I dared swear that there was a
tawny whisper to it. And it seemed to dance,
from beneath her hat, a very formal dance on her
cheeks. One had, with her, a sense of the
conventions ; and that she had just been playing
six sets of tennis.

“ If I look surprised/' T said, “ that is because
you are the first caller Gerald March has ever
had."

She seemed to smile, faintly, as one might in
the way of politeness. Otherwise she did not
seem to be given to smiling.

" He's my brother," she said, as though ex-
plaining herself, the hour, everything. " It's very
nice of you to have opened the door. . . ."

8

THE GREEN HAT

I was listening, oh intently! One had to, to
make out what she was saying. Then the voice
suddenly expired and one was left standing there,
listening to nothing, unprepared to say anything.
It was, you can see, rather silly; but one got used
to it.

“ Oh," I said, “ Gerald wouldn't open a door !
He never opens doors. ..."

She looked vaguely about our lone. I was proud
of our lane at that moment, for it set off the
colour of her hat so well. There was no doubt
but that she was tired. Seven sets, possibly. Her
eyes seemed at last to find the car of the flying
silver stork.

" That car ... I suppose it will be all right
there ? "

She seemed to me to lack a proper pride in her
car I said I thought it would be quite all right
there, as though a Hispano-Suiza was a usual sight
near my door ; and 1 suggested that maybe I had
better see her upstairs to her brother's flat, as it
was the top flat and there weie no lights on the
stairs. But she appeared to be in no hurry.
Thoughtful she was. She said dimly: "You are
very kind. . .

One somehow gathered from her voice that her
face was very small.

“ I've often wanted," she murmured, look-
ing about, “ to live in this place. You know,
vaguely. ..."

“ Of course, vaguely," I said.

She looked at me, seemed to see me for the first
time, seemed faintly surprised to find herself talk-
ing to me. I was surprised, too. Maybe it was
the way her hair danced formally on her cheeks
that made it look such a small face, but it seemed

THE GREEN HAT

9

to me no larger than a small size in ladies' hand-
kerchiefs. That was why I was suiprised. She
stood carelessly, like the women in Georges Bar-
bier's almanacks, Falbalas et Fanfrduches , who
know how to stand carelessly. Her hands were
thrust into the pockets of a light brown leather
jacket — pour le sport — which shone quite defi-
nitely in the lamplight : it was wide open at the
throat, and had a high collar of the fur of a few
minks. I once had a friend who was a taxi-
dermist, and that was how I knew that. One
small red elephant marched across what I could see
of her dress, which was dark and not pour le sport .

“ Perhaps you are right," she admitted doubt-
fully. Not that I had the faintest idea what she
was talking about.

I went before her up the dark narrow stairs,
sideways, lighting and dropping matches, after
the custom of six years. There were three floors
in the little house, but the first was untenanted
except by mice. I wondered whether it would
interest her if I told her I was leaving to-morrow,
but I did not see why it should. She, after all, had
probably just come back from foreign parts. About
her, it was perfectly obvious, was the aura of
many adventures. But I was looking on her in
brotherly sort, interested in her because she was
Gerald March's sister. For that was a most
deficient man in every other respect. Fancy, I
thought. She said : “ Oo, isn't it dark ! "

“ Of course," I said, striking yet another match
against the wall, “ I knew Gerald had a sister, but
I had a vague idea, I don't know why, that she
was still at school. ..."

" I don't suppose," she said helpfully — stumbled
slightly, I helped her — “ that anyone knows

G.H. B

10

THE GREEN HAT

everything . Is that mice downstairs? Rats? Oo,
really. . . . Gerald and I showed, once upon a
time, a strong tendency to be twins, though there
was a good hour between us, so I was told. I was
at the tail end of the hour.” Slowly struggling up
those dim, narrow, musty stairs, her green hat
now and then flaming in the matchlight, she gave
one worthless information in a slightly husky,
impersonal voice. As we came up to my landing
I asked her if she had seen Gerald lately.

" Not,” she said, whispered, “ for years and
years. Nearly ten, I think. Do you think that
comes, perhaps, of having been almost twins once
upon a time?”

I did not say anything for I was thinking hard.
Now I was Gerald's friend. This lady of the green
hat was Gerald's sister, nay, his twin sister. Fancy,
I thought. Where, I asked myself, did one stand ?
It was a matter for thought, for deep thought, and
so I treated it, as she did not appear to be in any
great hurry.

Now while these things were passing the lady
and I were standing on my landing, which was
four foot by three; she with one foot on the stair
below, one leather shoulder against the wall. And
one had again, with her, a sense of the conventions.

“ You are thinking/' she accused me. “ I
wonder what about. . .

The light that plunged through my half open
sitting-room door fought a great fight with the
shadow of her green hat and lit her face, mysteri-
ously. She was fair. As they would say it in the
England of long ago — she was fair. And she was

? :ave, so grave. That is a sad lady, I thought.

o be fair, to be sad . . . why, was she intelli-
gent, too ? And white she was, very white, and

THE GREEN HAT

ii

her painted mouth was purple in the dim light,
and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart,
were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were
blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing
blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in
the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens
had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they
sang of better dreams. But no siren, she ! That
was a sad lady, most grave. And always her hair
would be dancing a tawny, formal dance about the
small white cheeks.

She smiled, when it occurred to her that she
was looking at me.

“ I know what you ar^ thinking," she said.

"‘I wonder!"

“Yes. You like Gerald, don’t you?" She
thought about that. “ Well, what you are think-
ing is, whether it is fair to him to take me up theie
in case he is drunk. . .

“ If only it was ' in case,'" I said. “ You see? "

She closed her eyes.

“Poor Gerald!” she whispered. “Isn’t it a
shame ! "

“ I’m afraid," I said, “ there's nothing to be
done. ...”

“ Oh, I know ! " Oh, she seemed to know that
from her heart. And I wondered why they had
not seen each other for ten years. I couldn't
imagine her disliking Gerald — childish, furious
Gerald ! Probably, I thought, he was to blame,
and I wondered if there was anything in Gerald's
life for which he was not to blame. Poor Gerald.

“ You see," the slightly husky voice was saying,
“ I just came to-night on an Impulse. I am
scarcely ever in England. ..." The voice expired.
We waited, and she acknowledged my patience

12

THE GREEN HAT

with a jewel of a smile. “ And I suddenly thought
I would like to see Gerald to-night. Please/'
she suddenly begged, so seriously, “won't you
let me? I'd like just to see him . . . but if you
think . . .?"

“ Oh," I said, “ come on."

She laughed, a little nervously, abruptly. Gerald's
door was at the head of the next flight of
stairs, and it was, as usual, wide open. She
moved one step forward into the room, she
stopped, her eyes on the ceiling, as fixed as lamps.
Yes, those were very sensible eyes. She didn't
look at Gerald.

“What is it?" she asked dimly.

“ Whisky," I said. It was so obvious.

“ But more than that ! There's certainly
whisky, but ..."

“ Wet shoes. ..."

“ But that's too literary ! Oh, of course I Old
women in alms-houses. . . ."

She was talking, it was so easy to see, against
her eyes. Now she was here she didn't want to
see Gerald. She was trying to put off the moment
when her eyes must rest on Gerald. Still just
within the dingy room, she looked everywhere
but at Gerald.

“ Lot of books," she said.

I made to go, but the slightest hint of a start
detained me. She suggested her gestures. That
was a very quiet lady. She didn't, if you please,
intrude her womanhood on the occasion. Women
do that unconsciously. But she didn't do it, un-
consciously. She met a man on his own ground.
That was a gallant lady.

“Oh I" she said. “ Oh ! "

“ Might just as well come away," I muttered.

THE GREEN HAT

13

I was used to Gerald, but at the moment, at her
sudden whisper, I would have liked to murder him.
Here for sixteen months not a soul had come to
see him — and now, before his sister, and his twin
sister too, he was in this vile state. But she had
insisted on seeing him. What could I do ? I pro-
mised Gerald a pretty speech on the morrow. He
would be more or less human to-morrow, for Gerald
had those phenomenal recuperative powers that
are peculiar to lean drunkards.

11 The illness/' I told her, “ goes in periods of
three days. On the first day he is thoughtful, on
the second he is thoughtless, and on the third
speechless/'

I could not see her face, her back was to me.
The leather jacket, the brave green hat, the
thoughtful poise. But I heard her whisper the
name of the inert thing sprawling half on a broken
Windsor chair and half across the littered table,
and it was as though there was a smile in the
whisper, and I thought to myself that these twins
must have been great playmates once upon a time.
“ Gerald I ” she whispered. " Gerald ! Gerald ! ”

" Oh, go to hell ! ” muttered Gerald, and, with-
out looking up, without waking up, twitched his
head feverishly to one side, upsetting a tea-cup
half-full of whisky.

0 He thinks it's me," I explained from the door,
and suddenly I found her looking at me over her
shoulder, so thoughtfully. I can see her now, the
way she suddenly looked at me, half over her
leather shoulder, thinking I knew not what, and
her right hand spread out on her brother's arm.
There was a striking emerald on the third finger
of her right hand, livid against the dark thing
that was Gerald March.

*4

THE GREEN HAT

" Only twenty-nine/' she told me gravely,
" Gerald and me. ..."

"Oh," I said. What could one say?

" Bad luck, I do think," she murmured. I
wondered, you know, whom she was talking to.
Certainly not to me.

" He's a very good fellow," I said.

" Heredity, you see," she suddenly explained.
" Father almost died of it. Brandy, though. He
liked brandy, Barty did. They said he would die
if he had more than half-a-bottle a day, but he
had a bottle to make sure, and then he died of
pneumonia."

Then, in her silence, she was so still that I grew
very uncomfortable. What was she thinking
about? She was staring down at the sprawling
thing that was her twin brother, the emerald still
livid against his arm.

" He wrote a very good book once," I said, to
say something.

"Yes. About Boy. ..."

"Boy?" Gerald, you see, was no talker. He
just swore, but automatically, it meant nothing.

"Didn't you know?" She looked at me again,
but her eyes seemed to me masked. I was to know
later why her eyes were masked just then. I said
I knew nothing at all about Gerald.

She passed a finger over one of her eyebrows,
and looked at it. " Dirty," she said.

" Years ago," she said, " before the war, Gerald
had a very great friend. Gerald, you see, is a
hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and every-
thing, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper.
And no hero, no Gerald. And so, when his hero
died, Gerald died too. Funny life is, isn't it? Then
the war, and that, of course, buried him. And

THE GREEN HAT

15

now . . . ” Those absorbed, blazing bine eyes l
The sea was in them, and the whisper of all open
places ; the magic of the sea was in her eyes,
whipped with salt and winds.

“ No friends?” she asked dimly. " No women?
Nothing?”

And just at that moment I had, for the first
time, that feeling of incapacity with her. I was to
have it again, profoundly, but I remember vividly
that it came for the first time just then, in poor,
furious Gerald's room. Dingy — that is what I
felt before this quiet, thoughtful woman with the
absorbed eyes. Dingy. I felt, I suppose, the
immense dinginess of being a human being, for
there is an immense, unalterable dinginess in being
human, in the limitation of being human. But
why I should feel that particularly with her I did
not know then. She, too, was human, quiet,
gentle, very unaware. But, later, I was to know
why.

It was with an effort that I told her about
Gerald. That feeling of self -dinginess came some-
how to a point in just feeling common. For I was
what Gerald was not, what she obviously was not.
I could somehow “ cope with ” my time and
generation, while they were of the breed destined
to failure. I was of the race that is surviving
the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of
lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery ; while they
of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died
that slow white death which is reserved for privilege
in defeat.

Gerald, I told her, was a more solitary man
than I had ever known or thought to know. I
supposed he had a small income, for he seemed to
manage to live. He was very shy, absurdly shy.

THE GREEN HAT

16

tortured shy. She nodded gravely, and I went on
to say that shyness was a cruel disease with
Gerald : it was a shyness, to strangers, without
charm, for he never could show his shyness, he
must show everything but his shyness. And so it
was that he couldn't get on with people, and now
he had ceased to try, he just had drinks. Every
Sunday afternoon he went to tea with his aunt
Lady Eve Chalice in Mount Street.

" It was Eve who really created my impulse/'
she told me, then : “ Oh, here ! " and I found I
had an empty cigarette-case in my hand and that
she was offering me hers. It was an oblong white-
jade case, and chained to it by a double chain of
gold was a hectagonal black onyx box which may
or may not have held powder. One comer of the
hectagonal black onyx was initialed in minute
diamond letters : I.S.

" Iris," she said . " Iris Storm/' And she

smiled, childishly, formally, saying : “ You have
been so nice, I had forgotten we didn't know each
other." I told her my name, in that embarrassed
way one always does tell anyone one's name, and
we smoked a while in silence. She inhaled her
smoke with a faint hiss, and her teeth were a
regiment of even bits of rice-paper standing at
attention, very smart and sharp. Teeth always
give one ideas. These were imperious, dangerous
teeth. On a middle one was wedged a small string
of tobacco : it lay coiled there like a brown
maggot, and when I told her about that she re-
moved it with the nail of her small finger, and
regarded it. She had a great talent for looking
at nothing in particular, and that was the only
likeness I could see between the twins : thoughtful
they both were. Suddenly, from the tousled dark

THE GREEN HAT

*7

head on the table came a jumble of inarticulate
words. She listened intently. Gerald shivered,
but his face remained buried in his crossed arms.

“ He's dreaming," I said. She looked at me,
and I thought there were tears in her eyes. But
as they never fell, I am not sure. Thoughtful she
was, smoking. . . .

“ Why does God do these things? " she asked in a
suddenly strong, clear voice, a most surprising voice ;
but I said nothing, knowing nothing of God.

“ Let us go," she said.

“ Shall I tell him you came ? "

She thought about that, looking at me. “ Yes,"
she said, “ will you ? Please. Just that I came.
You see, Gerald doesn't . . . well," she smiled
somewhere in those eyes, " let us say he is against
me . .

We were in the doorway of the soiled room of
the drunkard. I was going to switch out the
light. Often I would come upstairs and switch out
Gerald's light.

“ Gerald," she said suddenly, in that strong
voice, and I thought of a prefect's voice at school,
down the corridor of a dormitory. “ Good-bye to
Gerald.

“ You see," she said to me, " Gerald and I are
the last Marches, and we ought to stand together.
Don't you think so ? "

" Yes, you ought," I said gravely. One hand,
the hand of the great emerald, hung against her
leather jacket. " Certainly you ought," I said,
and raised the hand to my lips. Her hand smelt
dimly of petrol and cigarettes, and a scent whose
name I shall now never know.

“ These defiant courtesies," she said thought-
fully. “ They're very nice, I always say. . .

THE GREEN HAT

18

3

Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow
stairs to my landing. In the sudden flare of my
match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh
just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had
occasion to rebuke myself on the depravity that is
man. She said over her shoulder : “ Hilary

Townshend has told me about you. . . ."

“ But he has never told me about you ! "

" Oh, he would if you provoked him ! "

" And may I?”

But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary
had, I thought, said something about Gerald
March having a sister, but I had not connected the
vaguely heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I
don't know why, but I had always imagined
Gerald's sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere
in the country with a bankrupt old gentleman
called Lord Portairley, Gerald's uncle.

We were on my small landing now, in the light
that plunged out of the half-open door of my
sitting-room : she with a foot on the stairs leading
downwards, away.

“ Good-bye," she said. “ Really, I think you've
been very kind. . .

She seemed to me very nice and gentle ; yes,
nice ; and then it seemed to me that across her
gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh,
impersonally, in the fires of herself. I was on
another planet. Hilary tells me now that he also
had that feeling with her ; but Hilary must have
struggled against it, whereas I am incapable of
struggling against any feeling.

“ Good-bye," I said.

THE GREEN HAT

*9

I was looking not at her but through the half-
open door into my room. There lay the disorder
of my life, the jumble, the lack of purpose, the
silence, and the defeat of my life. I wasn't, it
seems almost an intrusion to say, very happy in
those days ; but that is by the way in the history
of Gerald March and Iris Storm.

Now here is the difficult part of this history.
Of the many gaps it will contain, this seems to me
the most grave, the least excusable. One should
write, if not well, at least plausibly, about the
things that happen. And yet I cannot be plausible
about this, because I do not know how it hap-
pened. I mean, how she came into my room and

sat down. I did not ask her. Did she want to?

Mrs. Storm was a lady who gave you a sense
of the conventions. Mrs. Storm was a . . .
and yet ... 1 do not know anything about
her.

I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add
her together; and, of course, failing. She showed
you first one side of her and then another, and

each side seemed to have no relation with any

other, each side might have belonged to a
different woman; indeed, since then I have found
that each side did belong to a different woman.
I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly
met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I
have thought of her — foolishly, of course, but shall
a man be wise about a woman ? — as someone who
had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed
into our world from a land unknown to us, a land
where lived a race of men and women who, the
perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their
inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that
marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called

20

THE GREEN HAT

being human, shall have finally annihilated each
other in our endless squabbles about honour,
morality, nationality.

We have all of us a crude desire to “ place " our
fellows in this or that category or class : we like
to know more or less what they are, so that, maybe,
we may know more or less what we shall be to
them. But, even with the knowledge that she
was Gerald's sister, that she was twenty-nine
years old, that she was the niece of Lord Port-
airley, you could not, anyhow I couldn't, " place "
Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather
despairing one, that she didn't fit in anywhere, to
any class, nay, to any nationality. She wasn't that
ghastly thing called " Bohemian," she wasn't any
of the ghastly things called " society," “ county,"
upper, middle, and lower-class. She was, you
can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her
own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn't
intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that
was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed
herself from somewhere, but where was that some-
where ? You felt she was tremendously indifferent
as to whether she was outlawed or not. In her
eyes you saw the landscape of England, spacious
and brave ; but you felt unreasonably certain that
she was as devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart.
She gave you a sense of the conventions ; but she
gave you — unaware always, impersonal always,
and those cool, sensible eyes ! — a much deeper
sense that she was somehow outside the comic,
squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we
judge as to what is and what is not conventional.
That was why, I am trying to show, I felt so pro-
foundly incapable with her. It was not as though
one was non-existent ; it was as though, with her.

THE GREEN HAT

21

one existed only in the most limited sense. And,
I suppose, she affected me particularly in that
way simply because I am a man of my time. For
that is a limitation a man can't get beyond — to be
of his time, completely. He may be successful,
a man like that — indeed, should he not blow his
brains out if he is not ? — but he who is of his time
may never rise above himself ; he is the galley-
slave working incessantly at the oars of his life,
which reflects the lives of the multitude of his
fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so 1 had with
this woman that profound sense of incapability,
of defeat, which any limited man must feel with
a woman whose limitations he cannot know. She
was — in that phrase of Mr. Conrad's which can
mean so little or so much — she was of all time.
She was, when the first woman crawled out of the
mud of the primeval world. She would be, when
the last woman walks towards the unmentionable
end.

“ Good-bye," I said, and then, as I looked from
the disordered room and my disenchanted life at her,
the eyes in the shadow of the green hat were
brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned.
** Why are you laughing ? " I asked, or perhaps I did
not ask that, perhaps she had not been laughing
at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor
her eyes were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt.
I pushed open the door of my room.

" How I would like," she said, that husky voice,
“ a glass of cold water ! " That was what she said,
and so 1 let her go in alone into the sitting-room,
whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely
and long I let the water run, pleased with the way
it was filling the little house with its clean roar,
pleased with the clean scent of the rushing water,

22

THE GREEN HAT

which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then
she said : "You have had a quick bath," and so
we became friends.

She stood among the littered books on the floor,
looking round at the disorder, like a tulip with a
green head. She sipped the water, looking round
wisely over the rim of the tumbler. 1 explained
that I was leaving to-morrow, and therefore the
disorder.

We talked.

In that disordered room, so littered with books
that you might hardly take a step without
stumbling over one, it was not difficult to talk.
Indeed, it is never so easy to talk about books as
when they are about the floor, so that you may
turn them over with your foot, see what they are,
pick them up and drop them anywhere with no
precious nonsense as to where they should exactly go.

She waved her glass of water about, sipping it.
A drop of water clung like a gem to the corner of
her painted mouth. It was not fair.

Talking with her in that room was like talking
with her as we walked on a windy heath : she
threw out things, you caught all you could of
them, you missed what you liked, and you threw
something back. Now and then something would
turn up in a voice which was suddenly strong and
clear, and every time her voice was strong and
clear you were so surprised that you did not hear
so well as when she spoke inaudibly. She had
none of the organised, agonised grimaces of the
young lady of fashion. But one knew she was
not a young lady of fashion, for she hadn't a
sulky mouth.

Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely
discriminating taste which maddens you : you

THE GREEN HAT

23

try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing
at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion
of enjoyment. She used some words as though
she had never heard anyone else using them.
“ Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly im-
mense sense. The word seemed turned topsy-
turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy.
She used the word “ common,” I think, to denote
a thing attempted and achieved scratchily. Mr.
Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “ common.”
But Miss Clemence Dane in Legend was. “ Oh,
come ! ” I said, for to me Legend is an achievement
in literature.

“All those women talking and dissecting and
yearning together,” she said. “ Their breath smells
of . . . oh, red hair ! ” She thought Miss Romer
Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time :
The Grand Tour particularly. She was loyal to
girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr. Temple
Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was
“nice.” “Nice?” I said. “ Well, wonderful.”
she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem
slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “ common,”
a “ stunt ” writer.

“ I detest the word ' stunt/ ” I said.

“ That is why,” she said, “ I used it about
Monsieur Morand. He is an abbreviation, like
nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her.
She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for
luncheon. “ What,” she asked, “ is the hurry ? ”
I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps
English was not the language for abbreviations and
diminutives. She deferred to my judgment about
that, and I said what I said. One just didn't
discuss Barrie : there he was. “ You can't laugh
me out of him,” she smiled, “ by calling him

24

THE GREEN HAT

whimsical/' She had once enjoyed a book by Mr,
Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called
Guy and Pauline There was Heigesheimer. She
put up a gallant, insincere defence for the Imagistes
but it turned out that she had never read any, and
wasn't at all sure what they were. " They're
short for poetry," I said coldly, " like nightie for
nightingale." But perhaps the book she most
profoundly liked was The Passionate Friends , with
perhaps the last part of Tono-Bungay. "And, of
course," she said, “The Good Soldier ," Mr. Ford
Maddox Hueffer's amazing romance. From a
table she picked up Joyce's Ulysses , looked at it
vaguely, dropped it absently on the floor amongst
the others. I held a watching financial brief for it.
One was to find later that she was completely with-
out a sense of property, either her own or other
people's.

" It's a funny thing," she mused. . . .
"What's a funny thing ?"

" Satirists. . . . They are all very plain men.
Grubby, too. Why ? "

"my?" I said. "But, really "

She looked at me through the smoke of her
cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never
knew what about. . . .

"Genius," I said, "has "

" Of course, genius. But "

" They are striving," I said, " for "

" Yes, I know. But why are they always so
ugly? I mean, these people called 'satirists/
One sees them abroad, at the Rotonde, or in
Rome, Florence. ..." I saw her among them,
the small white face, the cool, sensible, huge
eyes, very attentive, deferring. " They marry
plain, too. Always. Invariably. Why? And

THE GREEN HAT

*5

man and wife hang on to each other like grim
death, despising everything hard. And they come
out in spots. Why? One just wonders . . .
It seems to need very ugly men with very un-
attractive wives to despise things, to show us our
ugliness. Has ever any even fairly human-looking
person ever been a ‘ satirist ' ? But I suppose if
they weren't so plain they wouldn't have so much
time to be obscene on paper. Or am I talking
nonsense ? "

" It's absurd," 1 said, " to make it a question
of looks "

"But it makes me furious!" she said in that
suddenly strong clear voice. " These despisers !
These grubby clever men with their grubby genius.
The heroes of the weekly reviews. Their impotent
little obscenities. I've tried to find, in knowing
them and reading them, a great, real contempt,
something as fierce and clean as fire, a nightmare
of contempt, so that from the pillars of burning
smoke we can build beings of better shape than
ourselves. I've read, watched, listened, wanting
to know. . . ."

I said things, too. But who am I ? For instance,
I said : “ You don't allow to all men one common
failing, which shows particularly when the men are
satirical writers : they must always wTite about
women rather in the spirit of unclean-minded
undergraduates who are very upset at not having
physically enjoyed their first Woman as much as
was to be expected. It is from such things that
satirical genius is made. You should be more
tolerant, Mrs. Storm. . .

We talked of vulgarity. She had once read a
book of mine, and I complained bitterly of my
vulgarity, saying, you know, that one didn't begin

G.H. C

26

THE GREEN HAT

by being vulgar, “ but one began/’ I suggested,
" by being just bumptious. The meeker you are,
the more bumptious you probably are inside, but
that does no harm. Not that I was ever really
meek. And at the beginning there’s a tremendous
humility in you to yourself. You can’t have any
achievement without that humility, and yet you
lose it later on because you find out all the wrong
things about yourself. People are only too ready
to show you the wrong things about yourself.
They like doing it. They seem to think there is
something wrong with conceit. It irritates fools,
because they think it is unwarranted. How do
they know if it is unwarranted, and what does it
matter if it is or not ? Or it irritates them because
they too once had in themselves a humility to
themselves, and then allowed it to be, according
to that Bottomley - Kipling - John - Bull gospel,
‘ knocked out of them.' And so if a young man is
not very strong he lets the mischievous fools take
his conceit away from him, he turns his back on
his real conceit, which is himself — he has it ‘ knocked
out of him,' just as any taste for music was knocked
out of him by his public-school — and goes out for
one of the spurious conceits which are called * being
as others are.' Then he has put his feet on the
endless and never-ending roaa of vulgarity, and
there are very few turnings. . . ”

She sat in the deep wicker armchair, which had
come with me from Chelsea six years before but
would travel nevermore. It creaked madly as she
sat down, and she glanced at it in surprise. “ Of
course," she said, " it’s contagious. . , /'

M You are quite wrong," I said. " The real
sticky part seems to come from inside one. And
there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of

THE GREEN HAT

27

defeat — a writer, I mean, who must earn his living
by writing, and so must always write. For it is
more difficult for a second-rate writer not to be
vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle's
eye. It uncoils from somewhere inside you, like
a nasty, sticky snake. So slick it is, too. So
helpful, often. And when you see it for the first
time you stare at it transfixed, and you say, ‘ But
I am not vulgar ! ' But you get used to it later
on. Very few people notice it. Most people like
it. And, of course, it pays.”

" The golden snake,” she said. “ It's quite a
good snake. It is silly to despise money.”

" Writers,” I said, and, I think, said rightly,
” love money, they adore money 1 Successful
writers, I mean. The ones who have become
venerable, the ones who have made great names
by writing about the irony of life and the incap-
abilities of wealth, the writers of the people for the
people. They worship money, they hoard money.
One and all despise rich people, and are perfectly
beastly about tiie upper-classes. You should ask
any publisher about the business capacity of any
great author who writes about the Irony of Life.
They will argue about sixpence, kick up a row about
sixpence-halfpenny, and if they have a mistress,
as men who write about the irony of life should
have, they will allow her about as much a year
as a Jew gives to a schoolboy. To really intelligent
men of the middle-classes, living in sin does not
seem nearly so wicked as living in luxurious sin.
I only know one successful author who has the
decency to get drunk with his easily-earned money.
One should keep a sense of proportion about money,
and you can only do that by throwing it away.
The Jews, for instance ”

28

THE GREEN HAT

" Jews," she said, “ are charming. The rich ones,
I mean, and preferably the fat shiny ones. They
understand luxury and elegance, and elegance is
an enchantment that the skin loves. But now-
adays only Jews have an idea of enchantment, only
Jews and Americans. Furs, jewels, spacious rooms,
trellised terraces, all lovely baubles, silks of China,
myrrh, frankincense, and motor-cars. The Jews are
disenchanted, but at least they're brave enough
to insist on having all the enchantments of disen-
chantment. Luxury, ease, splendour, spacious-
ness. You'll say they're florid. Well, they may
be, they are, but they’re also the last towers of
chivalry. Mr. Chesterton goes running after them
shouting about beer and the Pope, but if you're
going to leave chivalry to beer-drinkers and the
Pope, God help enchantment. You'll say that the
Americans' indulgent admiration for their wives
almost borders on the gaga, but they fight for it
very really, they don't just talk and indulge. They
fight with money, they have the courage of their
cheques, they dare tremendous duels, they get up
at unearthly hours in the morning to dash towards
the rendezvous, and they draw a cheque just as
gallantly as any rather caddish cavalier ever drew
a sword. ..."

“ Englishmen," I said, " respect their women . . ."

" Maybe," she said absently.

We were impersonal. Now and then the wicker
armchair creaked beneath her, and she looked at
it with faint surprise. Now and then a car screamed
on Piccadilly, an electric-landau sounded its bells
through Shepherd's Market towards its garage by
Camelot House. Now and then her slightly husky
voice expired. Then we waited a while. She
stared deeply into the eyes of a mask which a

THE GREEN HAT

29

Russian artist had once given me in exchange for
a poker debt. It lay sideways against a comer of
the fender. I waited for her to say something
about that, for it was the mask of a Florentine
gentleman that was a lecher. I had grown used to
it, as one can grow used to anything, but people
would remark on it adversely. The lady of the
green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew
that for her everything was inevitable. That is
an important thing to know about a woman, for
you know then that you will never know where
you are.

We became personal. She said : “ Let us talk
about our friends now/'

“ To-night," I said, “ I have been to a party
at the Hallidays'."

"Ah, the pitiless vulgarians ! Surely, between
us, we can do better than that I "

" There's Hilary. . . "

" The sweet ! Can you not love Hilary ? But
to-night," she said very seriously, " I have been
dining with old Maurice Harpenden. How he would
hate me to say old ! I went out all the way to
Sutton Marie to do that, because he expects it of
me when I am in England. We are enemies,
and we watch each other. He was very courtly.
They are difficult to deal with, handsome old men
who have known once since one was so high. You
need to be a woman to know what I mean, but you
must try to pretend for a minute. Thank you.
Organically, of course, they are perfect, uood
features and long legs and iron-grey hair. Character
and clothes by Robert Hichens. They are very
courtly, and then they touch one. Now, why do
they do that ? They pretend to do it in a friendly
way, as any gentleman of the old school might to

THE GREEK HAT

30

the daughter of another gentleman of the old
school : but they make opportunities . ..." The
husky voice committed suicide, was buried, and in
the third second rose from the dead. " I do not
understand men. I do not understand the ' old
school ' type of man, nor what ‘ old school ' means,
unless it means that you never did anything at
school except win the Battle of Waterloo. Then
as soon as you left school you were qualified by
good-looks, a charm of manner, and a habit of
becoming popular with elderly men which is peculiar
to right-minded young Englishmen, to become
Major-Genera! Sir Maurice Harpenden,

C.M.G., D.S.O., and to lead your troops in battle
with that gallant inefficiency patented by English
infantry -commanders who know a good horse when
they see one. After which you can spend the rest
of your Kfe in bantering . You can see that I do
not like Maurice. We dine, and we are enemies,
and we watch each other."

" The sire doesn't seem very like the son.
Napier is a saint ..."

The chair creaked. She was looking at me from
under her hat, gravely as a Red Indian. " There
were two roads leading from a certain tree, and
when we were eighteen life said to me, ‘ You go
this way/ and life said to Napier, ' You go that
way/ And so we did that, and so it has been. . . ."

Now I was staring at her mouth, which was a
silky red mouth engraved with I don't know how
many deep downward lines, and my heart beat
twice so loudly that I wondered if she had heard
it, for she whispered sharply : “ Listen 1 " But it
was only a clock striking somewhere in London,
and its striking was quickly done.

“ I must go," she said, but not even the armchair

THE GREEN HAT

creaked, and her green hat was still crushed
against the back of the chair, and her eyes were
still staring profoundly over my shoulder. There
was only the window there. The curtains were
not drawn, and I thought I would draw them, but
it seemed a pity to move. Her eyes glowed like an
animal's. She was staring, absorbed, over my
right shoulder, but there was only the window
there. She was asleep. Then her eyes dilated into
glowing points, and her Kps said : "On a envie ”
Then she made a gesture of distaste.

She said : " There are desires. . . ."

" Heavens, do you need to tell me that ! "

" Oh, not those desires ! " Expressionless, blaz-
ing eyes absorbed over my shoulder, she waved
away “ those desires/' I was snubbed.

“ They call it," she* said, “ the desire-for-I-know-
not-what. They will find it one day when we are
dead and all things that Kve now are dead. They
will find it when everything is dead but the dreams
we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not
cigarettes, it is not cocaine, nor opium, nor sex.
It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving.
It is not love's delight, it is not bearing children,
though in that there are moments like jewels.
There is one taste in us that is unsatisfied. I don’t
know what that taste is, but I know it is there.
Life’s best gift, hasn’t some one said, is the ability
to dream of a better life. . . ."

The green hat crushed recklessly against the
back of the chair, she stared, still and absorbed,
at the names that friends of long-ago had written
on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her
eyes glowed, glowed like an animal’s. The light
of the reading-lamp on the littered table by my
elbow kissed her Up, and the light kissed the faint,

32

THE GREEN HAT

faint down on her lip into a few minutes of exist-
ence as a garden of gold dust. A sword lay in my
mind, twisting and shining among the inner
grotesqueries where we keep ourselves, in the real
sense, to ourselves.

I forced my mind to a more legal aspect of her.
There were two rings on her wedding finger. A
narrow circle of platinum, a narrow circle of gold.
I wondered if she had been married twice. I tried
to imagine her husbands. They would be tall,
handsome men, and she would be passionately in
love with them. She would, like all women in
love with tall, handsome men, be worshipful as a
dog. Physically they would be very courteous to
her, but no more than courteous, and mentally
they would, if I may say so, treat her rough. They
would go to sleep quickly, and she would lie awake
far into the night, pressing her breasts, because
they hurt her. She would think. She would not
think. Then one day, when she was between
thinking and not thinking, she would be unfaithful,
and the tall, handsome man who was her husband
would apologise to her for not having understood
her better. But she would say, with cold eyes :
“ There is nothing to understand. On a envie”
Then he would say, “ Oh ! ' and instruct her
lawyers to divorce him.

" I was trying,” I said, “ to imagine your hus-
band. ...”

The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the
hat one blue eye looked at me like a blue stone
worn by fire. “ Two,” she said. " They are
dead.”

I wondered what she saw, looking over my
shoulder. She kept strange, invisible company,
this lady. She walked in measureless wastes,

THE GREEN HAT

33

making flames rush up from stones, making mole-
hills out of mountains. Then suddenly the head-
lines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled
before my mind, stood livid against my memory,
slashed with the name of Storm. I had not a doubt
but that he had been her second husband. “ V.C.
murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C.
Left on roadside with five bullet wounds. . . ."

She said suddenly : “lama house of men."

“What!" I said. “You surprise me."

“ A house of men. Of their desires and defeats
and deaths. Of their desires, yes, of their deaths,
yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great responsi-
bility for me, and I have lodged complaints about
it, but it is no use. I am a house of men. Ah me,
ah me I Oh, dear ! My friend, there is a curse,
a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You
will see it in my eyes one day, and you will be sorry
for me."

“ You mustn't believe in curses," I said. “ Good
God, curses ! "

“ The Marches," she said, “ are never let off
anything. That is the curse."

Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as
wind is stronger than air, and always in them was
the magic of wide open places. I looked down,
and far below, like pearls in the dust, shone two
ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight I
thought of her fate and of her. I thought of cor-
ruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of
love's delight. I took hold of the sword in my
mind with both hands, but was not strong enough
to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of
the sighs of Anaitis, of the sharp cries of love's
delight. I thought how charming men would be
if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as

34

THE GREEN HAT

they can in their minds. I said : “ And so the
house of March, fatal and damned, can never avoid
its destiny. . .

“ Yes/' she said reasonably, " it can avoid it.
By not being weak enough to desire so strongly/'

M Oh, I see," I said.

" I'm glad you see," she said gravely. “ They
listen to voices whispering dreams. While they
listen, they do queer weak things. Of the soil
sordid — there is your March. But there is another
March, who listens to voices whispering dreams.
My father Barty March was, I think, one of the
most loved men of his time. Like Napier is now,
but of course Napier behaves. A policeman found
Barty early one morning on the doorstep of a
house we had then in Cambridge Square. He
used to say he was never drunk until he closed
his eyes, but this time he had closed his eyes into
pneumonia. He only opened them once again,
to look at Gerald and me, sixteen years old apiece.
He smiled, you know, because Barty couldn't
help smiling. Besides, he was happy at last.

Avoid dreams," he said. “ Never stop to listen
to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run
over. Never sympathise with the moon when you
can hear it, cold and lonely and blind, crooning to
itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You will catch
pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which
men are men and women are women. You will
go mad. . . ."

Her right hand hung limp over the arm
of the chair. It was just faintly dirty, and
the nails shone like pink ivory. The emerald
on the third finger held my eyes enchanted
for a long while. She smiled at my look, and
as she lay her eyes swept falcon-like down to

THE GREEN HAT

35

the stone. It made me rise out of myself, that
falcon-like sweep of her clear eyes, and I thought
of the pitiless misbehaviour of life, that had
not let her stay within the sensible stability of
marriage.

" It's a bit loose/* she was saying.

" I was wondering. It's such a beauty ! Aren't
you afraid of it falling*'"

She shook her head, staring at me with a mis-
chievous smile. Her childishness did not jar.
She was always herself. “ Oo, no ! I have a
knuckle. I crook it. And lo, it doesn't fall. . , /'

“ But this sounds like a plot ! "

“ It is a law," she said. “ There are four laws,
variously entitled a, b, c, d. The law (a) declares,
against all formerly-held beliefs, that a flower is
less beautiful because it is sure to die. That is a
religious law, having to do with the unworth of
perishable things, if you see what I mean. The
law (b) has something to do with the fact that
all men with long legs make poor lovers. That is
a pagan law. \ ou aught write an essay on the
long arm of coincidence and the short legs of co-
respondents. It would be fun for you. The law
(c) has something to do with exhorting a woman
never to trust a man of honour, for he serves two
mistresses. That is the law of good sense for
amorous women, and will save them disappoint-
ment. The law (d) has to do with this ring,
which is a bit loose, according to the directions of
Jehovah."

'"You have mighty friends, Iris Storm!"

" Ah, I need them ! Desire is a child with
hungry eyes, and for him a dragon lies waiting.
This ring is a charm against dragons." The
slightly husky voice dreamed. It was an hour

THE GREEN HAT

36

for dreaming. She would mask unhappy things
with passing talk. " I called him Jehovah because
the same was a jealous God. And I would
mock him with that, saying that it was I who
should be jealous of him, for doesn't a man of
honour serve two mistresses, while it is well known
of women of dishonour, I would mock him, that
they never serve but one god at a time. But he
never was a worldly man, and so eaten by doubt
that you would have laughed if he hadn't been such
a pet. . .

" And so he gave you the emerald to be as a
witness against you, and to testify against your
frailty?"

" Now take," dreamed the husky voice, the
great eyes fixed on the ceiling ; and there was
a smile in them, like a distant wave of music;
" now take a night in Algeria. Take also a hill,
and on the hill a garden. . . ."

" The Hotel St. George, Mustapha Sup6rieur,
Algiers "

" Ah, don't forget the American Bar I "

" And the Benares bowls "

" And calorijlrts too hot or too cold "

" And Arab carpets from Victoria Street "

" And Americans wdth low heels "

"And a passion for 'mailing postals

" Not to mention veal every day "

" And a Soir6e de Gala every Saturday "

" And the best-dressed women "

" Of Tunbridge Wells."

"But take instead some red and purple flowers
against a yellow wall, some oranges, a tangerine
or two, three gazelles on a tennis-court, poppies
tall as choir-boys, the cactus, the palm, and the
pyramid cypress-tree. And watch, my friend,

THE GREEN HAT

37

two shadows that walk in the wicked shadow oi
the pyramid cypress, that stands m the garden
like a dark torch keeping watch over disillusion.
It is night, or have I already told you that ? Ah
me, ah me, now will she who walks there ever
forsake her love, will she ever be disloyal to her
vows, that were made with so much pomp and
circumstance in the Guards' Chapel at West-
minster before a congregation notable for the
absence of all her husband's relations ? Why,
her heart is confident, her heart is fragrant with
the honey of that moon's passage, and she knows
what she knows. And yet, and here is a most
pitiful thing, there must be something in her, some
fatal abandon, that sets men doubting, for he who
walked with her in the wicked shadow of the
pyramid cypress wore the silence of the destroyer,
so that her heart cried that he was misnamed, for
the mortal disease of his heel was suspicion. Now
I must tell you that it was Christmas Eve, and
after a little desultory conversation he said : ' Here
is a present for you, sweet/ and he gave me this
emerald which you are kind enough to admire.
'Alas/ I said, ' it is a little big for me 1 It may fall
from my finger, don't you see ? '

"'Yes, it may fall/ said he. 'But if you are
careful, my sweet, if you curve your knuckle in
time, it won't dream of falling, not it I' And then
I cried miserably, knowing there was a catch in
this somewhere, for at that time I was not yet
broken in and was still fearful of suspicion. And
I cried : ' Hector Storm, what do you mean ? '

" ' I mean, Iris, that you are as that ring "

" ' Beautiful but loose, Hector ? Ah, timeo
Danaos I "

" ' Iris, will you never be serious I Yes, you

THE GREEN HAT

3 »

are as that ring, which you must always wear on
the third finger of your right hand. And as that
ring may fall, Iris, so you may fall, for that is the
sort of woman you are. But as that ring may be
kept from falling, so may you keep yourself from
falling. Oh, God/ he said, ' my life is darkness
without you, 1 love you so, and it's a perfect hell
with you, I love you so I ' And he said much more
that is unmentionable, and I learnt something,
for it is only by listening to their husbands in
moments of intimacy that well-brought-up women
can become acquainted with certain good old
English words. And though I pleaded bitterly
that he was unfair to me, saying I was chained
to him as my wrist might be chained to a star,
which was no more than the truth, he insisted
that I c ould be constant only to inconstancy, and
so 1 was tired and went to bed. But look 1 Oh,
look ! Please look ! Ah, the discourtesy of time I
Really I must go now ! "

I drew my eyes from her eyes to see that the
dawn had slyly thrown a grey handkerchief over
the window. It was but the shape of the dawn
creeping out into the night, it was but a ghostly
breath in the night, but it was the dawn. And I
did not know what to say, for can a man deny the
dawn, that speaks good sense in its vast elemental
language ?

The chair creaked and creaked. She was going
now, there was no doubt about it. The texture
o 1 her face was grave, she was busy with the
angle of her green hat. I examined the sword in
my mind. The chair creaked and creaked, and
then it was as though snapped by silence, and our
startled eyes joined over the emerald that lay
on the floor like the echo of the kiss, which was

THE GREEN HAT

39

an unfair kiss. She shivered faintly, and drew
herself taut, and was very proud. She was remote
as the evening star, and very proud. Her
eyes were dark as in a crypt, and her eyes
looked lost, as thotigh she had strayed into a
maze. I lit a cigarette, and found my throat
dry and parched.

She found difficulty in speaking. I was amazed.

“ No/' she said. She shook her head, “ Cer-
tainly not. My ring, please.'*

Imperiously her finger pointed to the floor,
but her eyes were as plaintive as a nun's who has
strayed into one of the corridors of hell. That I
might walk with her there I again made myself a
Judas to her hand, and she shivered with her whole
body as in a torment, and she seemed to bite her
lip from within.

" It means nothing," she said coldly.

" I know," I said.

She breathed deeply, with a hand pressed to
one breast, as though it hurt her. I think it must
have hurt her very much. I was sorry. She
shook her head, as though she was in a cage, and
then she was as still as a cut flower. The whole
brim of the green hat was between me and her
face, we were both terribly alone. Her right hand
drooped naked over the arm of the chair, and I was
bending down to pick up the emerald to replace it
on the third finger when a cautious knocking came
from below.

That wa*» the second or third time of knocking,
and each time it was less cautious, and I knew it
to come from the policeman on the beat, who
would be wishing to have the primrose car put in
its proper place, which was not on the King's high-
road. I wondered if she had heard, but I could

40

THE GREEN HAT

not see her face. I wondered if she heard me
move. As I came to the door I switched out the
light and the dawn pounced on her green hat, but
she who wore it fought her battles carved in stone.
She said something, 1 did not catch what, and I
went downstairs and spoke with the policeman,
who was an amiable middle-aged man of my
acquaintance.

“ My brother is with me/' I said, “ but he will
be gone soon." Shepherd's Market was creeping
out into the dawn, draped and mysterious with
the shadows of night. A window here and there
was alight against the dark pile of Camelot House.
The great car stood like a bruise against the passage
of eternity, dawn fought for it, night draped it,
and the silver stork flew unseen. The small noises
of dawn stirred sharply in the night, and the lamps
wore pale, tired faces. “ Summer's well on," said
the policeman.

I re-entered the sitting-room, saying imperson-
ally : “ I'm afraid you must go, as . . The
room was empty. The figure that had been carved
in stone was wrapped in air. The disorder of the
room lay jeering at me on the dim carpet of the
dawn. It was all like a purposeless limbo stretched
between the night and the day, the room, my
life, hers, everything, the strong, the silly and the
brave. The hundreds of books lay in soiled con-
fusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that
has gone to the making of the soiled nothings
that we are.

I was seized by a catholic anger against the
woman. Through all the disenchantments of
youth, despite the contagious impurities of life,
in defiance of the crimes against love that we
call love, I had kept romance for my ghostly

THE GREEN HAT

41

companion. Romance was more than a silly
lithe goddess coming down from a marble column.
Romance was more than the licence to be shame-
less with clouded eyes. Romance did not steal
through the fleshy portals of the heart, did not
shiver at a Judas kiss, did not coil white trembling
limbs into the puerile lusts of the mind. Romance
was all that and was as much greater than that as
a religion is greater than a church. To romance,
which was the ultimate vision of commonsense,
sex, as sex, was the most colossal bore that had
ever distracted man from his heritage. And she
would palm a facet of this colossal bore off on me !
She would have me barter my ghostly companion
for the fall of an emerald, she would invade my
thoughts, perhaps my life, in exchange for a puny
pleasure that needs love to exalt it above the
matchless silliness of what, with an excessive zeal
lor scientific * lassification, is known to our civilisa-
tion as the sexual act.

I picked up the emerald from the floor, and it
smiled in the palm of my hand.

In the dusk of the bedroom, she lay coiled on the
bed. The hush of her breathing was no more than
the trembling servant of the silence. Then she
coughed a small cigarette cough. It was the usual
cough, and gave me back my confidence. “ Iris
Storm ! ” I said, but I wondered if I had spoken,
the frail silence was so undisturbed. She was
asleep.

Perhaps it was then that I realised that she was
beautiful. She was asleep. Could any but the
shape of beauty dare to wear that impertinence !
She lay on her side, she lay anyhow. The green
hat was gone.

“ Iris ! ” I said. Her hair was thick and tawny.

4 %

THE GREEN HAT

and if waved like music, and ihe night was tangled
in the waves o i hrr hair. It was tike a boy s hair,
swept back from the forehead, which was a wide,
clear forehead, clean and br av< j and sensible as a
boy's. Sensible, oh dear ! Ihe tawny cornstalks
danced their formal dance on the one cheek that
I could see, and the tip of a pierced ear played
beneath them, like a mouse in a cornfield. Above
her neck her hair died a very manly death, a more
manly death than " bobbed " hair was ever known
to die, and so it comes about that Iris Storm was
the first Englishwoman 1 ever saw with “ shingled''
hair. This was in 1922

1 decided that I did not know what to do. I
decided that that was just as well. “ I will play,"
I thought, “ a waiting game," and lit a cigarette.
But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like
a promise, and it smelled as grass might smell in a
fafiry land, and always about her there was that
faint dry scent whose name 1 shall now never know.
Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a
little shiny bit in the valley between her cheek and
her nose. To this I applied a little Quelques Fleurs
talc powder on a handkerchief, that when she
awoke she should not think so ill of herself as I did.
Hers was a small, straight nose with an imper-
ceptible curve, just as any straight line might
have, and its tip quivered a little as she breathed.
Her leather jacket pour le sport , that had a high
collar trimmed with some minks, was flung open,
and over the breast of her dark diess five small
red elephants were marching towards an unknown
destination. Towards her feet her hat lay with
my hat.

Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself,
for was I not being better than myself ? I would

THE GREEN HAT

43

replace the emerald on the thud finger of her right
hand. I would, when hair that was not my own
was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were
not my own took the cigarette from my mouth,
and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and where
the red elephants marched towards an unknown
destination stirred breasts full of shadows, and a
voice as clear and strong as daylight said : “ But
enough of this hell 1 ”

44

THE GREEN HAT

4

Of all that had once decorated the walls of my
sitting-room there was left by the removers only
a looking-glass in an ancient gold frame, above
the fireplace. My mother had once given me an
oil-painting, saying, " This will do nicely for your
flat," but I in my pride had thought a looking-
glass would offend the frame more judiciously.

She stood before that.

" What is the time? " she asked of her reflection,
and I told her that it was ten minutes to six.

"Have you a comb? " she asked of her reflection,
and luckily I had a comb which was not my comb.
She looked at it and saw that it was so.

“ Thank you," she said to her reflection.

The light of the tawny hair mocked the clouded
daylight, and when, with the palm of her hand on
her forehead, she swept the comb from front to back,
it flamed tiger-tawny and ate into my spirit. Tiger ,
tiger , burning bright, in the forests of the night. . . .

In the Upper Fifth at school there was a tall,
cold-eyed blood called Dwight-Rankin — I think
he died on Gallipoli — who used to sit at the desk
just in front of mine. He was a man of the mode,
wearing his fair hair plastered from front to back,
and his neck was clean and unspotted as a girl's,
and I would spend minutes wondering whether,
if one touched the gold down in which his hair
ended high above his neck one would feel hair or
only skin. The back of her head affected me like
that : it was just like Dwight-Rankin's, only dry,
and tiger-tawny.

She tore the small comb through the dancing
curls on each cheek, so that they trembled like

THE GREEN HAT

45

voiceless bells. It is a commonplace about women,
as assiduously remarked by brilliant feminine
psychologists as women's “ caprice ” and " intui-
tion,” that every woman must now and then
make a “ grimace of distaste ” into a looking-glass,
But she did not do that, nor need to. She was
untouched, unsoiled, impregnable to the grubby,
truthful hand of lex femina . She was like a tower
of beauty in the morning of the world. The out-
law was above the law of afterwards, impervious
and imperious. She was beautiful, grave, proud.
How beautiful she was now ! It was a sort of
blasphemy in her to be so beautiful now, to stand
in such ordered loveliness, to be neither shameful
like a maiden nor shameless like a mondaine , nor
show any fussy after-trill of womanhood, any dingy
ember of desire. It was a sort of blasphemy in
her, as it would be in a peacock to sing gracefully.

The silence got on my nerves, and I said some-
thing, anything. She looked over her shoulder
at me, vaguely. She was the male of the species
that is more fearless than mankind. I wondered
what she was going to say.

" My hat, please,” she said. I appeared to have
been holding it in my hand. With her left hand
she crushed it on her head and kept her hand on
the crown, looking at herself intently in the looking-
glass. I was startled at her eyes in the looking-
glass. They were cold blue stones, expressionless,
caddish as a beast's.

Down, down, with two fingers of her left hand,
she pulled the brim of the green hat over her left
eyebrow. She said : “ I think I must have left
my powder in the other room. Do you mind?”
I brought her the case of white jade and the box
of black onyx. She powdered, without interest.

THE GREEN HAT

46

44 Good-bye, 0 she said. Her hand was held out,
her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless.
I felt that they were the heads of the nails under
which she had nailed herself. It would be a kind-
ness to let her go quickly, a kindness which she
would not have allowed me had 1 been a woman
and she a man.

44 Good-bye/' I said. And suddenly the hand
that lay in mine pressed mine, and she gave a
vague, brittle laugh.

44 It seems a pity,” she said; and then the eyes in
the shadow of the brim seemed to open wide, wide.

44 You see?” she whispered. 44 You see?”

But I could see nothing but her silhouette
against the future days. 1 said : 44 We have begun
at the wrong end; but can't we work back?”

44 Oh, no ! ” she whispered. 44 It is not like that
a bit. You don’t understand. ...”

Suddenly I said many things.

She seemed, her hand still in mine, to be absorbed
in something just behind my right shoulder. There
was such fear in her eyes that I cried sharply :
44 What is it ? ”

44 The beast,” said the lips of the eyes of fear.
44 Just the beast. ...”

The word 1 said was drowned in the din of a
lorry that smashed through Whitehorse Street to
Piccadilly. She took her hand gently from mine.
44 There is a dream,” she said, 44 and there is a beast.”

She smiled.

44 That's all,” she said.

44 1 can understand regret,” I said, 44 but ”

44 Ah, we can understand, you and I ! We are
as old as sand ... at this moment.”

" But, Iris Storm, regret seems like a scar on you! ”

“ Not regret,” she said, so calmly, 44 Shame.”

THE GREEN HAT

47

And she took my hand again, closely. “ You must
forgive me. I couldn't have said that to any other
man. My shame mustn't shame you, please !
But you have a cold mind f you are disenchanted,
you will understand. And oh, if one could be
assoiled in human understanding ! You see, I
am not what you think 1 am not of the women
of your life. I am not the proud adventuress who
touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who mis-
behaves for fun, I am the meanest of all, she who
destroys her body because she must, she who
hates the thing she is, she who loathes the thing
she does ..." The breathless, pregnant voice
seemed to fall to the floor, like a small bird with
broken wmgs, and as it struggled upwards I said :
" You are like a bov after his first love."

" Oh, if it was boyishness ! " And she took from
the pocket of her leather jacket a tube of gold, and
she broke it into two pieces, and she stared moon-
struck at the carmine tongue of the lip-salve.

" To be born a chaste woman," she said to the
carmine tongue, " is good. I am in favour of chas-
tity. I would die for purity, in theory." She
painted her mouth, staring moon-struck into the
daylight. “ Yes, I would die for purity. I wouldn't
mind dying anyhow, but it would be nice to die
for purity. ..."

I said thus and thus.

" Yes," she said, not having heard a word of
mine, “ it is not good to have a pagan body and a
Chislehurst mind, as I have. It is hell for the
body and terror for the mind. There are dreams,
and there are beasts. The dreams walk glittering
up and down the soiled loneliness of desire, the
beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret.
Good-bye."

TfTF GREEN TIA1

48

“Then it must be ' good-bye * * "

She looked at me with a strange, daik friendli-
ness, and nodded.

“ Because of shame/' she said " But if I were
different, I would like you for my friend "

To my interruption, which she did not hear, she
said : “ I have only one lover. But I know that
only because 1 always feel unfaithful to him. It
would be good to be really bad, but I am not even
that, I onty misbehave. 1 will see you again*
when I have found my only love. Or I will see you
again when I am qualified to die for purity. I will let
you know, so you can be there, God bless you, dear."

And I said what 1 said, that He had, with Iris
Storm.

She went very white. “ That shall be written
down," she whispered, “ as the prayer of the only
man who ever shamed a woman of her shame."

“ My days of adventure, Ins Storm, are over,
A few years ago it would have seemed nothing to
me that you should disappear as you came, into
the great hole of London. To experts in adventure
that is, I think, the usual procedure. But now I
would like a trace of you. You must not leave me,
quite. If I may not see you again, mayn't I

She said she was in London now only on business
that would last a few weeks, and lived always abroad.
“ But this is the telephone-number," she said, and I
was looking round for paper and pencil when she said
“ Here ! " and her leather arm darted to the floor and
came up with a book, and on the fly-leaf of the book
she scrawled the number with her lip-stick.

High above the sharp noises of the young day
I heard the scream of an electric-horn.

CHAPTER TWO

The, Cavalier of Low Creatures

i

ND that, I think, is all that there really
is about me, as a person in the tale.
Of course, this first person singular will
continue, and there’ll no doubt be any
amount of “I this” and “I that,” but
that is because of the nature of the work, and
there’s never, the way 1 see it, much more than a
pen behind it. Hilary, however, and Guy de Travest
are not of my mind about this. We have recently
been talking about these affairs, and a sad enough
talk they made, and my two friends, my two seniors,
were reluctantly compelled, they said, to disagree
with me about my lack of responsibility in the
events to be related hereinafter.

To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain
things were decreed to happen and that, therefore,
they did happen : they had it in their blood, these
people, that certain things should happen to them,
and I could no more contrive these things than
they could evade them. But Hilary and Guy,
murmuring together in that astonishing unison
which can only be found in two Englishmen who
disagree upon everything in the world but on the
fact that conduct is three parts of life, are of opinion
that my substitution of the word “ ptomaine ” for
" septic ” really affected the course of events. Had

49

50

THE GREEN HAT

I, they say in effect, spoken the truth like a brave
little man, there would have been a divorce and
everyone would by now have been happy, as
happiness goes. And then, too, they have some-
thing to say about those two red lights, those two
rear-lamps of two cars sweeping into South Audley
Street — had I told Iris, they say, about Gerald,
those two red lights never would have been so close
together. Oh, Guy, what a man is that ! That
latter-day thunder-god of dandies, that warrior of
conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could
give " gratuitous information ” about any one!
Oh, Hilary, that friend of childhood!

Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March,
had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest
childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up
than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had
turned away from his friends, his people : he had
dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it's not
difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that
young man. But I was to find, after the coming
of the lady of the green hat, that it wasn't only
at the impulse of his furious nature that Gerald
had, well, withered fiercely into solitude. In very
truth that Gerald had been a hero-worshipper;
and in very truth he had become, as his sister had
said, a nothing without his hero. Very few things
had ever mattered to Gerald Haveleur March; but
those few things, one was to learn, had mattered
far too much.

His sister was, as it's not impossible to have
gathered, what is called declassie — even for a March
or a Portairley. And that was why I had heard
nothing about her from Guy or Hilary, ior while
Guy never gave gratuitous information about any-
one Hilary was held in thrall by that upside-down

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 51

but virulent form of snobbery which will make of a
man of property an extreme Liberal and a thorough-
going die-hard disapprover of anyone who let his,
Hilary's, caste down. Hilary, a sincerely good
man, was an enemy of caste, he was an enemy of
his own caste in particular, he did not believe in
it ; and yet, in the depths of that being where
lurks a dragon that can ultimately defeat even the
sincerity of a man of principle, Hilary believed in
nothing else but caste.

And Iris, of course, had betrayed her caste to
perfection. No one, you might say, could have
done that more thoroughly than Iris. She had been
malinspired to excess, she had reached Excelsior
in the abyss. But she was ever completely not on
her guard about what people might say or did
say, she had an amazing, an enviable, snapped
Hilary, talent for just not noticing things.

She had been quite surprised, Hilary told me
recently, when once he had taxed her with being
a renegade from her class. Genuinely surprised
she was, Hilary says. It simply hadn’t, she had
told him, occurred to her in that light.

" Rushing about Europe like that," Hilary had
said, “ you let England down. You've no idea,
Iris, how these young foreign blighters hold Eng-
lishwomen cheap.' 1 Iris had mamtained she had
a very good idea about that. (But you simply had
to disagree with Hilary. He was Uke that. And
he said “ hm ” all the time). And you only had
to travel on a liner to the East, she had said, to
notice how British matrons reacted to foreign parts.
As for Egypt ! But she always did her best, she
had said, to influence foreigners to a more lofty
view of the gallantries of British matrons.

" People cut you,” Hilary had said, for that

52

THE GREEN HAT

seemed to him an abominable thing, that she
should have put herself into the position of being
“cut”; and she had admitted having noticed
glaciers, but she had maintained that it was a far,
far better thing to be cut by a county eye than
to be killed by the boredom of a county tongue.
“ I arose from the dead when I was twenty,” she
had said. (Hilary, you understand, would provoke
anyone.) “ Your class,” Hilary had snapped, and
she had said she had never actually thought of
herself as belonging to any class. Her class would
be, she supposed, the landed gentry, same as
Hilary's. She was proud, she had said, to belong
to the same class as Hilary, and was very sorry
indeed if she had hit him in the eye with her heel.
But she hoped, she had said, that with him she had
always been a lady.

That had annoyed Hilary very much indeed.
But everything about any woman he liked would
annoy Hilary very much indeed. Mr. Townshend
was one of those Englishmen with an unlimited
capacity for disapproving of any woman, whom
he liked, who enjoyed being with other men as
much as with himself ; and an unlimited capacity
for finding other reasons than that for his dis-
approval.

As for Gerald, Hilary had last known him as a
“dark diabolical schoolboy” with a disturbing
capacity for threatening silences and an immense
— “ a corroding, almost,” Hilary said — admiration
for Iris. But not long after Barty March's death —
everyone had loved that drunkard ! — he had quite
lost sight of Gerald. Guy de Travest had been
Gerald's colonel in the Grenadiers for some time
during the war, but he never spoke but once of
Gerald as a soldier — “young hell-fire idiot" — and

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 53

never went near him while he lived above me in
Shepherd's Market. “ Reminds me/' Guy said,
*' too much of Barty left standing too long with
the cork out/' And that was more or less what
Hilary said, too. One must say this for the war-
riors of caste and conduct : they seldom try to
improve any man.

This chapter has been called The Cavalier of
Low Creatures because it is about Gerald, and
therefore it is a short chapter, for what on earth
is there to say about Gerald ? It isn't at all a
good description of him, but it is intended, if you
please, more as a flourish, a naive gesture. For
you simply can't let Gerald stand without a flourish,
without a something, anything. Besides, I liked
him, and would like to do him a bit of good. He
was, sans gesture, a zero with a scowl and a hat —
and a hat. Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but
who does not once write a novel ? I liked Gerald,
but I would not give him a line if he wasn't essential ;
and that is just what he is, essential, for these
things simply couldn't have happened without
Gerald. He hated his sister, he had not seen her
for ten years, yet it turned out that he was the
most important factor in her life. And, decidedly,
her love for him was one of the most important
factors in her life. I wonder if he knows. But
he too, even he, grew up in the end. I can hear
him now, through the twilight of East Chapel
Street, his shoulder against the saloon-door of the
inn. “ Give her my love," he said. But you will
hear him.

54

THE GREEN HAT

z

Sometimes I would see Gtraid in the Caf6 Royal.
I would be dining, with Hiiai} maybe, and in the
distance, cut as with a sharp knife in the tapestry
of smoke and grubby faces, would be Gerald,
darkly alone, a glass of whisky on the marble-top
before him. One wouldn't attempt to join him,
for it made Gerald shy, desperate, if anyone sat
with him while drinking. He hated being “ messed
about/' did Gerald; and if you joined him he
would presently mutter something about an ap-
pointment (Gerald with an appointment !), leave
his drink unfinished and go and order one some-
where else; and as I understood he hadn't much
money I did not like to drive him to that. Maybe,
though, he was less shy with me than with anyone.
“ I like you," he once said — oh, darkly!

One never knew, as he sat there or as he strode
about the streets, careless as a fakir impelled always
towards a terrible and nameless penance, what
he could be thinking of. Maybe he was thinking
of nothing. Once I saw him come out of a Cinema
Theatre with a look on his face as though he had
been tortured. He always looked, you know*, like
something. You noticed him.

He had a grey suit. It was thin as paper,
but still defiantly retained a little of that casual
elegance which not even Gerald could wholly
divorce from the combination of a good tailor
and a lean Englishman He never had but one
other suit that I ever saw, a brown affair, but he
bartered that wnth a boot -mender in Shepherd's
Market in exchange for mending his shoes. And
he had a hat. That was a hat. And never was

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 55

Gerald seen wearing an over< oat, no matter whether
it blew, rained, snowed or froze. See him any
winter evening striding down Half-Moon Street
in the biting rain, his thin grey suit blackening
with it, the jacket held by one button with deep
ci eases into his waist, the shapes of his knuckles
stuck through his trouser pockets, that hat — there,
but for the grace of God, went the most lovable
man I ever met.

“ Gerald — I say, Gerald 1 Why don't you wear
a coat on a day like this? Gerald, aren x you an
ass!”

“Coat?” Thoughtful he was always, and his
dark, sunk eyes would pierce the pavement or the
sky with unutteiable contempt. “Coat!” And
he would repeat the word softly until, you under-
stand, he had grasped the enormous idea, when he
would say softly, savagely : “ What the hell d’you
mean, 'coat?'” and away he would go, towards
that terrible and nameless penance of his.

Well, the flourish goes, the gesture is gone, to
the limbo that yawns tor all such vanities in the
very second of their birth. The Cavalier of Low
Creatures was never, to be sure, hailed as more
than a zero. But, even as the ground is not the
limit of a man's fall, as you may see in the picture
with the trail of flame, so zero is not the limit of a
man's nothingness; for what is that which is
nothing but so completely nothing that it may not
have even the mark of nothing ? it is, to be sure,
zero without the formative circle round it.

That solitary drunkard, that soiled ascetic 1
Those nightmare women, soft as the grass of Par-
nassus, marvellously acquiescent, possible. Aphro-
dite, Ariadne, Anaitis, white as marble, silent as
marble, silent and acquiescent, possible, as only

THE GREEN HAT

56

goddesses could be, the goddesses of soiled dreams,
as no woman born of woman could ever be. . . .

And yet one might have been wrong in imagining
the malcontents of the solitary drunkard's mind.
God only knows, of course, with what nightmare
fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them,
and grow out of them; men, at least, do not admit
even to themselves that they have not grown out
of them, men do not admit even to themselves
that while they indulge in continence they may
suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning
darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire.

That women walked in all the delicious beauty
of the unattainable through Gerald's tortured
mind, I know now. But 1 did not know it then,
for never was a man so secret with another man as
Gerald, never was a man so little given to discussing
with another those inevitable matters of desire
and concupiscence which only by being discussed
can be seen in a proper and proportionate light.
They should be aired, those secret silly things, that
they may be seen for what they are. In the old
days there was a god in a garden, and people would
do their best to make pretty fancies out of their
lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns, nymphs,
sirens, sylphs ; they, at least, got rid of them some-
how. But now that we see them plainly for what
they are, the nasty little enemies of our assault on
nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has
smashed the god in the garden and hidden the
pieces under the bed.

Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the
cleanest-mouthed man I ever met with ; while
from his book one had gathered that there was
one main idea in Gerald's mind ; this was purity.
It was to do with that one brilliant-childish romance

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 57

of his that, about seven years before the coming
of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then,
for more than five years, I had not seen nor heard
of him, had forgotten him, when one day a lean,
dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the
Hammam Baths in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped
me. I knew later that he must have been in an
agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked
intensely furious. I, not recognising him, thought
he was going to hit me, and gaped at him.

Bitterly and darkly he told me that someone
had told him there was a flat to be let above me in
Shepherd’s Market. 11 I’m staying here at the
moment," he muttered, looking indignantly at the
Hammam Baths. Several minutes passed before I
could place him, for he had been in uniform that
first time, in that transfiguring longwaisted grey
coat of the Brigade of Guards.

Gerald appeared suddenly, in the winter of
1915, at the office of Horton’s New Voice. Now
that Horton has left England on his adventure in
un-individualism one does not hear much of The
New Voice , but at that time and for long before
The New Voice was, of course, a power, and Hor-
ton was a Power. Quite apart from Horton’s
personal quality, you knew he was a Power because
several of the greatest of the intelligent writers of
our time kept on bitterly pointing out to their
million readers what a futile man Horton was.
Quite a number of the men whose names you
can "conjure with" now — it would be fun to
meet that man who is always in the street con-
juring with names ! — had begun by writing for
Horton's paper; but they had always gotten on
his nerves by the time they had become the greatest
of the intelligent writers of our time, and, since

G.H. E

THE GREEN HAT

58

Horton was an honest man, he told them so, and
he told them why, and he told them off, and they
were furious. But the most inspired among the
greatest of the intelligent writers of our time re-
venged themselves by republishing their New
Voice stuff in book-form and omitting to mention
The New Voice as the first medium of publication.
That was discourteous of them.

We were correcting proofs when Gerald
appeared. It was a Monday afternoon, and on
Monday afternoons any of Horton's writers who
wished could turn up and correct either his own
or someone else's proofs and then go and have
tea at the A.B.C. And Talk.

“ Hello ! ” said Horton. " Hello !”

“ Defence of the Realm/ 1 murmured Home.

We were not prepared for Gerald. We had, of
course, seen soldiers before ; indeed, there was one
in the room at the moment, the philosopher Home,
who was to be killed a year or so later. But Gerald
was a Figure, he was martial. The herald of the
dominion of hell upon earth, that was Gerald.
Take one small, frowsty room, the staff (Miss Veale)
addressing wrappers at a desk by the window,
Horton blue-pencilling at the other desk by the door,
four of us sitting cramped round correcting proofs on
bound annuals of The New Voice on our knees,
smoking, muttering — enter six-foot-two of the
Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night
and the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who
has seen Christ crucified in vain. The panoply of
war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier
in the real rather than in the technical sense of
the word: he looked, you know, as though he had
accepted death and was just living anyhow in the
meanwhile. Ah, see him then I Not even Gerald's

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 59

malevolent slackness in attire could make that
long-waisted grey coat with the red-silk lining sit
on him but imperially. Not Gerald's the common-
or-garden chubby face of a Guards' subaltern.
Gerald was no chap. He glowered at us.

“ Eh,” he stammered. “ I say . . . I’ve been
told that you people ...”

“ He's heard about us,” said Home sympa-
thetically. “ Sit down, boy. On the floor, I'm
afraid.”

Gerald began a fierce scowl at him — then grinned.
Dear Gerald !

“Well?” smiled Horton. Always courteous
was Horton, in manner.

“ Heard,” muttered Gerald, “ that you didn't
care what you published. ...”

“Oh!” said Horton. “Well, we don't care
how good it is, if that's what you mean.”

You couldn't guess that Gerald was so shy that
he could scarcely speak. You thought he stam-
mered just because he stammered, not because
he was so shy that he could scarcely get a
word out. A man had no right to look like
Gerald, an ensign of the fallen Prince of Light,
and be shy ; but that was always Gerald's
trouble, he never was given the credit for being
shy, he put himself between you and any sym-
pathy with him, he made it clear that he didn't
want your infernal sympathy. Just then, for
instance, he looked as though he had strayed into
The New Voice to send us all to blazes on general
principles. And Horton looked as though he was
quite prepared to go. Horton preferred bad-
tempered men.

* There’s this,” Gerald muttered, and lugged
out an enormous typescript from the deep pocket

6 o

THE GREEN HAT

of his grey coat. " Novel,” he scowled at Horton.
“ Thought perhaps ...” and he planted the
thing with a thump on Horton’s desk. Horton
grinned. Horton had had much too much to do
with professional novelists to think that a novel
by a subaltern of Grenadiers was necessarily un-
readable. “ Bit long, isn’t it ? ’’ he smiled.

“Long?” Gerald stammered. "Of course it’s
long ! Been writing it for four whole months. ..."

“ Ought to be good,” said Home gravely.

“ It’s awful,” grinned Gerald, “ but, you
see . .

“ Quite,” said Horton busily. “ Now, I’ll ...”

" Hello ! ” said Horton, for Gerald was not.
Horton threw the typescript to me to read. Of
course, it was mad. The New Voice published
most of it, and then Heinemann’s published it in
the autumn of 1916 and ran it into three editions
while people were still disentangling their eyes
from the paper wrapper, which showed a woman
with purple eyes crucifying a pleasant young man.

The Savage Device is open before me as I write,
and its opening lines are : " The history of Felix
Burton is the history of an ideal and a vision. They
had nothing to do with one another except that
the pursuit of the vision hardened him and blooded
him for the attainment of the ideal. The ideal was
aristocratic, in the sense that it was a striving
after nobility in life : the vision was a contradic-
tion, as scientific as it was mystic. The ideal was,
of course, defeated : the vision, of course, defeated
him. The ideal was purity: the vision had some-
thing to do with pain. ...”

The “ vision,” so far as one could see, had every-
thing to do with pain; in fact it was pain, and the
vision might or might not come afterwards. (And

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 61

I detest that word “ mystic.”) The book was
exciting and interesting because of a strange mix-
ture of high romance, desperate villainy and an
abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally.
Gerald’s hero had minority ideas about the war —
letting the landed gentry down again ! As for the
pain . . . Young Burton’s idea of it had not
to do with pain as a fact, but as the most sublime
among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald
wrote, " it is the only drug that cannot debase a
man. It can kill him, but there are worse ways
of dying than being killed.” It was full of
quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at
you with a dash sadly lacking in the originals.
Young Burton was, of course, going to die in the
war.

Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the
major and minor tortures of crime and martyrdom.
There was a long description of tortures, if you
liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s
books on them, with illustrations . . . very in-
teresting. Then young Burton had come across
the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain
there is a definite state of bliss and definite and
glorious visions of a real reality which men by ordi-
nary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But
poor old Gerald, try as he would, couldn't make
The Savage Device a novel of ideas: it remained
a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest.
Young Burton went everywhere in the world, hav-
ing adventures, getting magnificently hurt — South
Sea stuff — studying the effect of pain on men’s
minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a
number of visions.

Then he plucked Ava Foe from a " dive” in
San Francisco, she became Mrs. Burton, and then

62

THE GREEN HAT

he had every opportunity for judging the visionary
qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly
well written, the hell that Ava Burton gave him.
But young Burton’s ideal of purity was, naturally
enough, schoolboy stuff : fine in parts, but stuff.
The only part of it that was good was that it was,
somehow, purity. On the sexual side young
Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one
thought, unnecessarily callous young wife. In
Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking after the coming
of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about
Iris. I realised then how he must first have wor-
shipped and then hated his twin sister. What on
earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to
make him hate her like that? Ava wasn't in the
least like her, of course, but Ava might quite well
have been like any sister to any brother who hated
her. But this fierce, devilish, mediaeval passion —
why? Yet I should have guessed something of
the reason after Iris had told me that youn^
Burton was " Boy," Gerald’s hero of before the
war. But it never occurred to me to connect
Iris's casually dropped “ Boy" with the legendary
Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-The-War
fame. He will have his place, that dead Boy
Fenwick. A deep place.

“ Felix Burton’s" idea of what a man should
be to live nobly — he was full of those large striv-
ings of Young Men which were in vogue in the
Careless-Days-Before-The-War — seemed to take the
form of wanting to found a new race of something
like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of course,
without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn't. Nor
did young Burton want any of your waste of time
in graceful love-making; he wanted a sort of
ruthless companionship, with occasional patches

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 63

of mating; he did not want to procreate gracefully,
but with a sort of furious absent-mindedness.
Imagine Ava — Iris I Imagine Gerald himself,
drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft
possible woman of lonely dreams, detesting her
for destroying him . . . and for destroying Boy I
One wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever
known a woman. The dark knight of purity
. . . the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen 1

6 4

THE GREEN HAT

3

I did not see Gerald whilst I was shaking the
dust of Shepherd’s Market for ever off my feet,
for he was still asleep. I left Shepherd’s Market.
The hearty-looking man and the thin wizened
man who said “ Oi ! " and the little bent old man
with the blood-shot eyes gave me farewell.

That afternoon I snatched a few moments from
the arranging of the new place, which was only
round the comer, to go round and tell Gerald
that his sister had been to see him on an Impulse.
I had grown to feel responsible for Gerald: his
solitude was somehow like a scar across one’s
own life, a rebuke.

I caine upon him in our lane. I have forgotten
to say that Gerald, after a particularly hard spell
of dipsomania, would go riding on a hack from the
Mews nearby. He had a pair of fine polo breeches
with which to do that, and with Hie fine polo
breeches (Moss Bros.) went Barty March’s riding-
whip and the jacket of the old grey suit and that
hat. A highwayman on an off day, that is what
he looked like in the mean lane, passing the time
of day with the little bent old man with the blood-
shot eyes.

" You’ve been drinking,” said Gerald severely
to me.

" Billy Goat’s won the two-thirty,” wheezed the
little bent old man. His hat was the captain of
Gerald's hat.

One didn’t, perhaps, look one’s best in the
middle of a removal. But Gerald, confound the
man, looked positively healthy, taut, tempered,
weathered. Ach, le sale type anglais l I told him

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 65

that his sister had called. “ On an Impulse,” 1
said.

Gerald stared at me, his cigarette half-way to
his mouth. “ Oh ! ” he said. “ Oh ! . .

“ Here’s her telephone number,” I said. He
didn’t take the slip of paper I held out.

‘"Ere,” said the little bent old man, “ I'll give
it 'im when he’s better.” Gerald lowered his
cigarette, scowling at me pathetically. No one
else would have known it was “ pathetically.”

“ Iris called hell I ” he accused me. “ How
you lie! What?”

“ Honest to God, Gerald ! ”

He flipped away his cigarette and dug his free
hand into his pocket as though it was a weapon.
Those deep eyes scowled at me, but I wondered
what they saw.

“ That beast," he whispered, “ Oh, that
beast. . . .”

I left him.

And I did not see him again until the twelfth
evening later. I wish I had. I ought to have
been to see him, for I was in the habit of seeing
Gerald, and during those twelve days he might,
I think he would, have told me about the silly,
shoddy thing that had happened, and I could have
helped to make him see it as only a silly, shoddy
thing. What made me feel responsible for Gerald
was that his livid, unreasonable, childish contempt
for all accepted things was not contempt at ail,
but fear, just plain fear. He was, I mean, so afraid
of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretend-
ing to despise it. Piercing that tortured vanity, I
felt that life was a huge hungry beast ready to
maul Gerald if he so much as tried to placate it
— by using, say, a little pumice-stone on his fingers.

66

THE GREEN HAT

And one could never, after having seen through
his furious blague , be rid of an acute sense of the
shamefaced childishness in the man, a childishness
beaten down, gone crooked, which could only do
him a hurt if it was not watched. And one didn't,
quite definitely didn't, want Gerald to be hurt
more than he already hurt himself by just breathing.

But, whether it was because that involuntary
whisper of his about his sister had sickened me
even more than I had thought at the moment, or
whether it was merely because I was too busy
with arranging myself into the new place, I simply
did not seem to have the time to look him up during
those twelve days. I wish I had.

Nor, during those twelve days, would it have
come very amiss to talk a little about Mrs. Storm.
One would have liked to know just a little of the
history of that shameless, shameful lady. After
all, one didn't every day meet a woman with a
pagan body and a Chislehurst mind. But naturally
neither Guy nor Hilary were available during those
twelve days, for that is a way friends have ; Guy
because he was down at Mace with the May-fly, and
Hilary just because he was tiresome. Hilary, Guy
wrote from Mace, was helping a Liberal to fight a
musty bye-election in some Staffordshire place. '‘As
if," Guy wrote, " a Liberal ever won, as if a Liberal
could ever win without a pretty long start 1 and
a handicapper can never get a grip on anything
in a Liberal to give him a start on — sticky little
fellows they are, always sliding away somewhere.
And as if it mattered whether a Liberal did or
didn't win 1 He'll only get squashed with his
own petard." And, however it was, Hilary's
Liberal didn’t win, so maybe Guy was right. " In
ten years' time," says Guy, " Hilary will be the

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 67

only Liberal left in Parliament, looking happier
and younger and more sickening than ever.”

It was on the fifth morning after the coming
and going of the green hat that I was on an instant
afHicted with an impulse, and did on the same
instant act upon it.

“Hello!” I said.

“ Hello ! " they said. They were a she.

“ Could I speak to Mrs. Storm, please ? "

“ Who is that speaking, please ? ”

I quibbled quite in vain.

“ I will put the name down in her little book,”
said the she kindly.

“ Thank you,” I tried not to say bitterly. To
ring someone up on impulse and then have your
impulse perpetuated in a Little Book I

“ Mrs. Storm is not in town,” said the she.

“ Oh, I see,” I said. It is a detestable habit
some people have of saying “ in town ” or “ out
of town.” What town? There can’t, honestly, be
any real harm in saying London. . . .

“ Is there any message ? I always take her
messages.”

“ Oh, no," I said. " Thank you very much.
Good-b ”

“ This is Mrs. Oden speaking.”

"Oh," I said. Mrs. Oden?

“Yes?" said Mrs. Oden.

“ Well, thank you very much,” I said.
“ Good-b ”

" She never is, you know,” complained Mrs.
Oden. Now that was a loquacious lady. I do not
wish to be belittling anyone else, but I am sure
that she talked more in the next few minutes
than any other person of the same chest-expansion
in England. She seemed to have been suffering

68

THE GREEN HAT

from silence all that morning until my ring. I
learnt later that Mrs. Oden had once been Iris's
governess, that there was always a floor reserved
for Iris in her house in Montpellier Square, which
house Mr. and Mrs. Oden owed entirely to Iris’s
generosity.

“ She went off to Paris the other day,” com-
plained Mrs. Oden, " at a moment’s notice. Here
to-day and gone to-morrow. It is too bad of her,
when we never see anything of her. She is too
vague, I always tell her. I suppose she had made
some arrangement with you, Mr. er, has forgotten
to put you off, and now you are disappointed?”

"Oh,” I said. “ Yes, certainly.”

" Well, I expect her back any day, but how
long she will stay this time I have not the faintest
idea. Really it is too bad, she gets vaguer every
year. And here has her aunt Lady Eve Chalice
been wanting her address in Paris, and I have not
the faintest idea of anything ! What did you
say the name was? Oh, yes, of course, I have it
down. She will see it as soon as she returns, I
promise you. Yes, yes. Good-bye, good-bye.”

It was five days later that there came to my
my hand a large box labelled from Edouard Apel
et Cie., rue de la Paix, Paris and stamped " By
Air.” Within the large box were several smaller
flat boxes, and within these were reams upon
reams of finest white notepaper, but good, manly
stuff, stamped with my new address; and if that
notepaper had its way I never would have another
address, for there was enough in those small flat
boxes to last a reasonably reticent man for all
time. No note came with them. I searched.
Then, across the top sheet of the third box that I
opened, I found scrawled in pencil in an absurd.

THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES 69

schoolgirl hand : “ That one day you may write
to me to say that you have forgiven me for the
only dignity I have left : the dignity of the . .

I could not make out that last word for several
days. It was scrawled right across the foot of
the sheet, a long squiggle with one eye looking
out from the middle of it which might have been
an a. At last I thought it was “ unaware."

Much later Iris told me that it was " unaware.”
She said : “ I picked out the phrase from a book
I was reading, and sent it to you like a flower."

CHAPTER THREE

For Purity t
I

HE cavalier of low creatures dies hard;
surviving even our gesture, he loiters
dangerously in the tail of our eye, he
awaits, with piratical calm, the final
stroke; and only will he fade and be
for ever gone, despised and distraught, before the
face of him who bore the magic device For Purity,
whose ghost was to be raised by Mr. Townshend
over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of
the green hat. For, his wretched Liberal being at
last retrieved from somewhere beneath the foot
of the poll, that gentleman was again among us,
saying “ hm.”

We have so far seen but the shadow of Mr.
Townshend; now, at last, this shadow must emerge
into the tale of the weak Marches as the person
of Mr. Townshend of Magralt. He emerges, as
becomes a man of property who believes in pro-
gress as though it were a pain, in a dinner-jacket,
le smoking , a Tuxedo; of which the bow-tie is
gathered together with that dexterous carelessness
which is the affectation of elderly Englishmen who
cannot put up with any affectations whatever.
Now there is no known explanation for this pheno-
menon of the sickly bow-tie among Englishmen of
over forty years of age. That they are all

70

FOR PURITY!

7i

blackguards, Mr. Shaw has assured us. But haven’t
they, God bless one's soul, eyes ! It is not, of course,
of the least importance whether a bow-tie falls
straight or crooked, particularly on a grown-up
man. It is not, after all, of the least importance
whether one is clothed or naked. But one may,
in passing, be permitted to wonder on the curious
dispositions of the blind goddess Chance, whereby
not once in a long lifetime, not even by one little
bit of a fluke, will one of these elderly gentlemen
ever tie a bow to fall even approximately right.
They must, therefore, do it on purpose. But for
what purpose ? Let them, I say unto them, tie
their bows carefully while the bow-tying is good,
for voices from the Clyde are rising loud and
everywhere those snobs are dominant who
affect that the shirt of democracy should be a
dish-clout.

However, Mr. Townshend’s shadow does not
even yet grow in substance without some diffi-
culty. Between him and us, towards the dinner-
hour, intrudes knife-like that deuce of cavaliers,
he of the hat that Frederick the Great would have
envied, for that wrecker of homes liked his hats
soft and malleable, he liked to twist and torture
them as though they were no more than men.
In fine, Gerald made me late for dinner.

The clock of the Queen Street Post Office stood
at three minutes before eight o’clock as I passed
on my way to Hilary’s house in Chesterfield Street.
The roar of the marching hosts of Piccadilly was as
though muted by the still evening air. The small
straight streets of Mayfair lay as though musing
between the setting of the sun and the rising of
the theatre-curtain. Neat errand-boys, released
for the day, kicked their heels about on the curbs.

72

THE GREEN HAT

The drivers of sauntering taxi-cabs looked in-
quiringly, impersonally, into the faces of hurrying
pedestrians. Limousines lounged softly by. Past
me strode intently a tall raven-haired woman in
a bright green wrap with a high sable collar, and
moving frantically below were bright green shoes
and bright green stockings that appalled the suave
dignity of the evening light. These are not the
only green properties we shall see in this tale, for
women of the mode wore very much of green in
the year 1922 ; although, of course, some women
were not necessarily of the mode even when they
wore green. Some women should not wear green.
To such, their husbands should say s “ My dear,
I can't help saying it again, but really I've never
seen you look as well as when you're in black."

It was from the Curzon Street comer, just by
Jolley’s the chemist, that I saw Gerald. He was
across the road, against the entrance of the little
tunnel that leads into Shepherd's Market, buying
an evening-paper off a friend of ours, Mr. Auk, who
used to have his stand just there.

I crossed towards Gerald. I would be a few
minutes late for dinner, that was certain, but if
ever I was punctual at Hilary's he never was
dressed : a sense of conduct being the property
of imperious men, who must disregard the servile
virtue of punctuality.

I could not see Gerald's face as he stood on
the curb glancing at his paper, the brim of that
hat was so low over his right eye. Mr. Auk winked
at me as I came up. “ Oiled, that's wot ! " whis-
pered Mr. Auk. Then a friend of his came by,
and he and Mr. Auk retreated into the tunnel,
where I vaguely thought that Mr. Auk seemed to
be telling his friend something funny about

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73

Gerald. I never have passed the time of day
with Mr. Auk since I found what it was that he
thought so funny about Gerald that evening.

When I greeted Gerald he instantly looked up
from the paper to me. I remember now that he
seemed to watch my face for something, an expres-
sion, which he half-expected to see. But one
notices those things only later on.

“I say, seen the evening-paper? ”

“No. Why?”

The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the
thin hawk's nose, the fine, twisted, defiant
mouth. . . .

“ Why? How the hell do I know why !”

He crumpled his paper, thrust it under his
arm and dug the released hand into his pocket.
Thus was Gerald Haveleur March armed cap-a-pie
against life. He had something on his mind, one
could see that. But it would take hours to make
Gerald confide anything.

“ I say, have a drink ? ”

Now I wonder how many thousands of men
are at this very moment putting that question to
thousands of men ; yet that, if nothing else, would
have made that night significant in my life, for
never before had the solitary asked me or, I think,
any one to have a drink with him. Nor would
he, as a rule, have a drink if you suggested it.
And once, at a party I gave, he had some ginger-
beer. But, even so, I had to say I couldn't, plead-
ing that I would be too late for dinner. “ With
Hilary,” I said, and he scowled absently in a way
he had, and lounged up the road with me. Thought-
ful he was always.

That was a curious, capacious evening. The
Marches were gathered together that evening,
G.H. f

THE GREEN HAT

74

they who were never let off anything. As Gerald
lounged beside me the great primrose car with the
menacing shining bonnet passed us as silently as
though Curzon Street was a carpet. It was empty
but for a boyish chauffeur. Gerald, I suppose,
did not know it, and I did not remark on it. I
wondered if Iris had surprised Mrs. Oden by re-
turning suddenly. Poor Mr. Oden. . . .

" What have you been doing with yourself lately,
Gerald ? "

" Doing ? " His eyes pierced the pavement the
other side of my shoulder, for tall was
Gerald.

He grinned. . . .

" You'd never guess," he grinned.

I did not like this grinning. It was unusual in
Gerald. It was like a crooked mask on the fine
dark face. There was by ordinary no grinning
froth about Gerald . . . and, somehow, it crossed
my mind that maybe Gerald was hard-up. I asked
him, oh tentatively, if anything was " up."

"Up? The hell's up. O Jesul" And he
grinned, . . .

"Yes, but besides that — anything?" Not, you
know, that I thought for one moment that any-
thing really was " up." It was merely that I mis-
liked that grinning.

I can see him this moment so clearly, the way
he suddenly threw back his head and stared from
under the brim of that hat as though into the
heart of the heavens : the dark, defiant, hungry
silhouette searching the heart of the above.

We were at the corner of East Chapel Street,
where the great American pile of Sunderland House
debases itself before the puny roofs of Mayfair i
it loitered clumsily against the soft evening light.

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75

reluctant to yield to the grey embrace of Lon-
don. ...

“ God I ” sighed Gerald. Like a child, like a
child . . . and like a fiend he suddenly laughed
up at the veiled heavens. “ Imagine, you fool,
just imagine the bloody degradation of being
alive I ”

But I will leave out Gerald's 44 bloody”s. One
is tired of saying, hearing, reading that silly word.
It is only chickenfood, after all, and does very well
on the lips of the young ladies of the day, but there
is no reason why grown-up people should use it.

” I like you,” he said, as only that devilish child
could say it. 94 You sit on your imagination as
though it was an egg, and a nice little chicken
comes out. God, I wouldn’t be you ! Look at all
the pretty eggs you'll hatch and not one have a
chance to grow up into a splendid, lovely old hen
that’ll peck at the dung you call life. Why don't
you write about fallen archangels ? They're the
only things worth writing about, fallen archangels.
Phut to you, that's what I say. ...”

I managed then, for the first time in our friend-
ship, to suggest that if perhaps he was hard-up,
well, phut to him. . . .

44 Look here, that's not fair,” stammered Gerald.
Shy himself, he made one want to sink into the
ground with shyness. “ I mean, that's putting
friendship to music, isn't it? What?”

“ Oh, nonsense, Gerald ! There's nothing so silly
and mean as this reticence about money. . .

“ God, but you've given me an idea I I'll tell
you what I'll do for you, as you're late for dinner.
I'll damn well lend you a fiver.”

" But, Gerald ”

" You talk too much,” Gerald stammered. “ I'd

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76

like to do you a bit of good. And I’ve still got to
thank you for chloroforming me and lugging me
off to that Home for Drunks, thanks very much.
Now, am I going to lend you a fiver or am I going
to make such a rough-house just here that all the
police in London will come and arrest you for
soliciting? I’ll scream if 3'ou don’t touch me!”

I was in a hurry. I had to take that fiver. I
have that fiver still.

“ I’ll keep it for you,” I said. " Damn you.”

“ Yes, you keep it for me,” said Gerald thought-
fully. " Nice, fivers are ...” and then, savagely
muttering “ Oh, hell ! ” he strode abruptly
away down the slope of East Chapel Street, which
leads into Shepherd’s Market. Drunk or sober,
you simply couldn’t tell. You never knew that
man was drunk until he was speechless. I was
hurrying away when his voice held me — and a
very clear boyish voice Gerald had, like a prefect's
at school.

“ I say, seen that sister of mine again? . . .
You haven’t?" He seemed to reflect profoundly.
” I say, if ever you do, give her my love. What ?
I say, don’t forget. ...”

“ I won’t forget," I called back. “ Good-night,
Gerald." But he had turned away, and the last I
saw of him he was putting his shoulder against
the saloon-door of The Leather Butler. I plunged
across the road to Chesterfield Street, glad of the
message I would certainly give to Gerald’s sister.
Maybe to-night, somehow. A furious conference
of livid pink and purple monsters hung over Sea-
more Place, where the sun was sinking into Ken-
sington Gardens.

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77

2

" There was a cocktail for you/' said Hilary
gloomily, “ but I drank it, in case it grew warm. '
I thanked him politely for the idea. “ It wasn't
an idea, really/' said Hilary gloomily. " It was
an impulse/*

It is not, therefore, impossible to understand
how it came about that there were not a few people,
youngish people, who considered Mr. Townshend
to be a tiresome man. They said : “ He is very
nice, but frankly, isn't he rather tiresome?" I
supposed he was rather tiresome.

Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing
was going well with him, he would look no more
than forty; when everything was going well with
him, he would look about forty-five; when he
was crossing a road, that is to say when he was
thinking, he looked about fifty. The last was, I
believe, his age.

Hilary was a man who had convinced himself
and everyone else that he had neither use nor
time for the flibberty-gibberties of life. He col-
lected postage-stamps and had sat as Liberal
Member for an Essex constituency for fifteen
years. To be a Liberal was against every one of
his prejudices, but to be a Conservative was
against all his convictions. He thought of democ-
racy as a drain-pipe through which the world
must crawl for its health. He did not think the
health of the world would ever be good. When
travelling he looked porters sternly in the face
and over-tipped them. His eyes were grey and
gentle, and they were suspicious of being amused.
I think that Hilary treasured a belief that his

THE GREEN HAT

78

eyes were cold and ironic, as also that his face was
of a stem cast. His face was long, and the fea-
tures somehow muddled. It was a kind face.

Hilary is the last in direct line of the Towns-
hends, who have held Magralt, a Tudor manor on
the Essex coast, since a Townshend deserted to
Henry Tudor on Bosworth Field. The Townshends
of Magralt have always been soldiers, “ and that,"
Guy, first and last a soldier, will say, “ is the only
reason one can see why Hilary is a politician by
profession and the foremost stamp-collector in
Chesterfield Street by the sweat of his brow."
But one has to report that Hilary was once, before
witnesses, perfectly beastly to an American gen-
tleman who said that Blucher had arrived in time
for the Battle of Waterloo.

But it was on the question of marriage that
the two friends would indugle the sharpest differ-
ence of opinion; or rather, Hilary's wasn't an
opinion, it was a lurking Silence.

" Suppose you die," said Guy de Travest. " You
might. You are ten years older than me in years
alone. You may receive your call to higher things
at any moment. Look how I beat you at squash
the other day 1 Let us suppose, then, that you
are as good as dead. Unmarried, childless. You
have done nothing. You are nothing. You leave
nothing. Except, of course, what was left to
you "

" Less," said Hilary.

“ Your memory, then, goes down as that of a
sickening philatelist. Whereas, had any one of
your ancestors had a chance of a bit of war like
ours, he would have died a Major-General ! "

“ A Field-Marshal, Guy. You forget that the
Townshends have the reputation of having lost

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79

more of their soldiers' lives than any other service-
family in England." And so it would go on for
ever, Guy contending that as Hilary was nothing
in himself it was disloyal of him not to wed and
bring forth direct heirs, while Hilary's attitude
would be one of benevolently beckoning to the
sombre heights of Cumberland, where sat the house
of Curle-Townshend, heirs-apparent to Magralt
and all its fiefs.

Anyone, as Hilary was once goaded into mutter-
ing, would have thought that Guy's own marriage
was the happiest in the world; at worst, anyone
might have thought that it was a happy marriage,
as marriages go. Guy, it was said, adored his
wife. Guy, it was said, never spoke to his wife
except in public and as he passed through her
room in the morning towards his bath, when he
said " Good-morning." It was Lady de Travest
who volunteered this information. “ I do not
see," said Lady de Travest in her slow soft voice,
“ why one should for ever conceal the fact that
one's husband is cruel to one. It is nothing for
one to be ashamed of, is it?" Moira de Travest
was a quiet woman, with slow graces of move-
ment, statuesque, exceedingly handsome in what
you might call a public way, with a dark, re-
strained smile in the blue eyes under the hair
that shone like black silver. Suddenly she would
give a very loud laugh, and then her eyes would
shine boyishly for a second. She had many inti-
mate friends among women, and at times she was
rather brilliant in a man-like way. Foreign Am-
bassadors liked to be with her. Mr. de Laszlo,
M.V.O., painted her. Women novelists had tea
with her. Twice a year she would say that a day
must come when she must take a lover, but she

8o

THE GREEN HAT

gave one a profound sense that there was nothing
in the world she could endure less. But, whatever
it was that had gone wrong between those two
ten years before, they had a son, a boy of sixteen,
at Eton, and Guy de Travest would remain by
his marriage without question of separation or
divorce. That was cruel of him, Moira's friends
said, but Guy was a very catholic gentleman, and
he loved his son beyond all things. In the earlier
pages of country house albums one might come on
photographs of Guy and Moira arm-in-arm, yellow
Viking and black silver. They did not seem to
have aged at all since then, but maybe Lady de
Travest was a little more statuesque and her eyes
would shine more and more boyishly.

Hilary and Guy were friends. Inseparable, they
were inimical. They agreed on nothing, nor had
they one taste in common. But maybe it is in a
similar tempering of a sense of conduct that
Englishmen, regardless of all overt differences,
will find their deepest friendships. Conduct was
for Guy and Hilary one of three facts, the other
two being birth and death. And it is they and
their opposites who must finally make the storms
of life. Warriors of conduct and enemies of con-
duct — there is the issue that has still to find its
final battlefield. Hilary's Liberalism, in that
issue, would come crashing about his heart; of his
head he would take no account, for it is not by the
head that one decides in ultimate moments. Guy,
tall as a tree, Guy the latter-day " thunder-god of
dandies," would make a flaming figure, standing
against the afterglow of the fires of an old religion
called aristocracy. But Guy was far from being
of those Tories, of whom Mr. Galsworthy has
written with such cruel sympathy in Fraternity

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81

and The Patrician , who are obsessed by an illusion
of their own exclusive right to national captaincy.
Guy did not think that the hope for England or
the world lay in himself or his caste. He was not
a clever man; but his contempt for politics was
bom of a conviction that there was no hope of
curing the diseases of life and society by anything
that any body of men could do. Men individually
must clean themselves within, questing for and
grasping what cleanness there was in them.
There was a frozen storm in Guy's eyes, and
they were very clean. But, of course, he was
not very clever.

Those two men are for me symbols of an
England that I love. I am not sure that I can
explain what that England is. I am not sure that
I would like to explain it even to myself, as, maybe
for the same reason, I would not like to read Jane
Austen with a mental measure. I am not sure
that there is such an England, that there ever was
such an England. The soil, to be sure, is there,
the clouds across the sun, the teasing humours of
the island seasons: the halls, the parklands, the
spacious rooms, they are there. But the figures
that sweep across them — are these that we see,
all? Are there no others, lost somewhere, calmly
ready to show themselves — are these that we
see, all? These healthy, high-busted women with
muscles like those of minotaurs, these girls who are
either stunned with health or pale with the common
vapours of common dancing-halls, these stout,
graceless ones here, those too slender, bloodless
ones there, these things that have no voice between
a shout and a whisper, these things that have
yielded to democracy nothing but their dignity —
are these that we see, all? These rather caddish

82

THE GREEN HAT

young men who have no vision between a pimply
purity and vice, who are without the grace with
which to adorn ignorance or the learning with
which to make vulgarity tolerable, these peasant -
minded noblewomen, these matrons who appear
to have gained in youth what they have lost in
dignity, these toiling dancers, these elderly gentle-
men with their ungallant vices — are these that
we see, all ? Or was there never such an England ?
Were the parklands and the spacious rooms never
peopled but by nincompoops let loose by wealth
among the graces of learning and fashion ? Was
there never such an England as I myself once saw in
the magic of a spring morning in London ? It was
no more than the passing picture of Guy de Travest
walking by the sulky side of Piccadilly, as he must
always do to pass between his house in Belgrave
Square to his club in Saint James's Street, to which
a few gentlemen will still absently resort. I saw Guy
walking against the broken sunlight of the Green
Park, and then I did not see Guy. It was as
though from one step to another he had walked
into a dimension wherein the desires of his heart
melted his person into the England of his heart,
and he was rendered invisible in the ambience of
the Green Park and against the ancient landscape
of Saint James's.

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83

3

Hilary says that I was very quiet over dinner
that night. He remarked it, he says, because it
was so unusual. Hilary has an illusion common
to Englishmen, that if a man can utter three con-
secutive sentences without breaking them up
with “ eh,” “ ah,” “ hm,” " mm; and any other
noises that may occur to him as fit and proper,
he must be held to be talking too much.

How on earth, I was wondering, could I cast
the name of Mrs. Storm before my host with even
a tolerable hope of his more than grunting at it?
For, of course, one never discussed women with
Hilary. I believe he had been a member of several
clubs once upon a time, but in these degenerate
days he had finally withdrawn into the impene-
trable fortress of the Marlborough : Guy and he
agreeing that, since it was once said of a King of
Spain that he had died of etiquette, they envied
rather than cared to overlook their young friends
in the exercise of the long lives assured to
them.

" He will, if you provoke him,” Iris had said,
absently enough. And, indeed, never but once
had I ever heard Hilary expand at the mention
of a woman's name, and that was when I had
provoked him by defending her, the lady in ques-
tion being one for whom he had a great regard
but who had, as they say very aptly in the popular
phrase, “ gone completely off the rails.” As re-
gards Iris, in that case, it should be child's work.

Hilary says now that he was able, so soon as I
mentioned her name, to account for my subdued
air. Such, Hilary says, was the aftermath of Iris's

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84

effect on men. But all he said at the time was,
snappy like, that he hadn’t even known she
was in London and would I have port or brandy
or both, because I was detaining them at my side
of the table? I said I was sorry and how amiable
Mrs. Storm had been about him. " And fancy,”
I said, " her being Gerald’s twin sister ! ”

"Why ‘fancy?’”

Hilary was annoyed. Now why was Hilary
annoyed ? Why do men get annoyed ?

“ She is beautiful,” I said, “ she is good, she
is ”

“ It seems to me,” snapped Hilary, " that they
make a perfectly harmonious pair of twins. Hm.
And he lit a cigar and reflected profoundly on the
flame of the match. Perhaps I had better leave
out his " hm’s.”

" There’s only one March," he said, pushing a
cup of coffee towards me as though he hated the
sight of it, “ who has ever been any good, and
that's the aunt. Eve Chalice, a dear old lady.
Heavens above, the March blood ! But they will
be near their last gasp now, with young Gerald
as the heir. ..."

It just showed, you know, how much one ever
knew about that young man. I had no idea he was
heir to anything, let alone the bankrupt earldom.
“ Ever since last July,” said Hilary, “ when his
uncle, Barty’s elder brother by a year, and his
cousin thought they would do some fifth-rate
mountaineering in Switzerland without a guide,
and tried by mistake to climb the Jungfrau. Hilary,
I remember thinking, seemed very bitter about that
mountaineering. You know, that bitterness of a
calm, normal, reasonable air, with a slight flavour
of old-world banter ? He seemed to want to give

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85

the impression that he rather gloated than other-
wise over the decline and fall of the house of Port-
airley. Gerald, as the nineteenth earl, Hilary
seemed to want to say, served the house of Port-
airley right. If Hilary could only have seen his
own kind grey eyes !

But that something, apart from the mere
existence of the Marches, had annoyed him, was
obvious; and presently I realised that the some-
thing was the fact that Iris had not let him know
she was in London, but that he had heard of it
from rne, from anyone, in fact, but herself. I
ought instantly to have guessed that was the
matter, Hilary being one of those detached men
who have no use for the flibberty-gibberties
of life.

Gerald, one thought, would make about as
pretty an Earl of Portairley and Axe as even the
Marches could boast. “ But at least/' I suggested,
"he will have a little more money than he has
now ? "

“ About," said Hilary, " minus five hundred a
year. They can't even bribe anyone to take Port-
airley, and so the old gentleman has to live in a
couple of rooms and pay the taxes on the property
from what his creditors allow him. That old curse
working, one would think. ..."

There isn't really a great variety among these
family curses. There appear to be no more than
two schools of thought among the cursers, one
which consigns the cursed to instant death, and
the other to prolonged disgrace ending in damna-
tion. The Portairley 's curse was of the second
variety, and poor Gerald appeared to be in at the
death for the damnation.

“ Vaguely," I said, “ I gather that Gerald and

86

THE GREEN HAT

his sister had some quarrel in the distant past.
But I happened to see Gerald as I came on here,
and he seemed ready for a reconciliation. In that
case, as Mrs. Storm seems to be wealthy ..."

Certainly Hilary could surprise one. He ex-
ploded, in that quiet parliamentary way which is
one of the loftiest dignities of a constitutional
country : " And thank the Lord she is 1 Imagine
the shoddy life of an Iris — with neither money nor
morals ! "

Evidently, then, Hilary had a great regard for
the lady of the green hat. You must remember
that until this evening not so much as her name
had passed between us. . . . "He will, if you
provoke him," Iris had said. Well, hadn't I I

Hector Storm V.C. had, it seemed, left her every
penny. Storm, steel, Sheffield. " Fine boy,
Storm," said Hilary, pulling at a stiff grey thing
which I forgot to mention he wore on his upper
lip without, however, succeeding in looking any-
thing but clean-shaven. " Boy Fenwick left her
all he had too, but she wouldn't, naturally, touch
a penny of it. You would think the world was
upside down when you came to inquire into the
moral sense of an Iris ! Strict as steel here, un-
bending as iron there — and then ! She gave all
Boy Fenwick's fortune over to old Aunt Fenwick,
since when the old hag has called Iris every name
out of the Apocrypha for her pains."

“ But, Hilary ! " I said. Hilary says now that
I was white in the face. " But did you say Boy
Fenwick? Boy . . . Fenwick?"

“ Her first husband," said Hilary; and he
pushed his port-glass an inch or two up the
polished surface of the table and stared at it.

You couldn't," he said, “ do better than young

FOR PURITY I 87

Fenwick. . . . Bit before your time, I sup-
pose. . . . "

“ I never dreamt/' I think I said, “ that Mrs,
Storm had been the Mrs. Fenwick. ..."

“ Mrs. Storm/' smiled Hilary queerly to his
port-glass, "has been everything."

But Boy Fenwick I And the shameless, shameful
lady of the green hat as the tragic Mrs. Fenwick !
So there was " Felix Burton " and his ideal of
purity ! And there, plain as hate could make her,
there was "Ava Foe," and somewhere there was the
reason for Gerald's mediaeval hatred for his sister !
Somewhere there, but exactly where ? For no one
knew less of Boy Fenwick's death than I did, that
being a legend of “ a little before my time. . . ."

" I knew Iris," Hilary was saying thoughtfully,
playing with the stem of his glass, “ when she was
so high. They had a house in Cambridge Square
then, and she used to go to that school in South
Audley Street where they all go to. I'd see her
walking along with her governess, a long little
thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. Hm.
She was adorable."

There was a pause . . . and suddenly he
turned his face to me, that long thin grey-looking
face with the kind, muddled features. And it was
as though it had, suddenly, profoundly, lost all
its inner calm. Hilary's outward calm, in spite of
his detached air — “ Mr. Townshend, the imper-
turbable champion of procedure " — was always
rather like a Gruyere cheese, a sort of smooth
surface with gaps. But this was different, this
was as though a tap had been wrenched loose
inside him, letting run a savage, hurt bewilder-
ment which didn't quite reach his skin. " And
now," he said softly, yet looking at me as though

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THE GREEN HAT

accusing me of something. “ And now ! The last
I heard of Iris was that she was seen night after
night in a Russian cabaret in Vienna with an
Italian Jew who is said to have made a fortune
by exporting medicated champagne to America
There's the long little thing, all brown stockings
and blue eyes. ..."

“ But," I began, and decided that it was
better not. But it was absurd, that “ night after
night." That wasn't, I knew, Iris Storm. Not
“ night after night." She might very possibly
have sat one night in a Russian cabaret in
Vienna with an Italian Jew who exported
medicated champagne to America, but certainly
not “ night after night." Unless, that is, she
had changed a great deal since then. After all, one
couldn't be more unattractive than an Italian Jew
who exported medicated champagne to America.
No, really, that was too much.

“ Your generation," said Hilary thoughtfully,
" is a mess. Have some brandy."

" It's absurd," I said, “ to talk in 'generations.'
Slack novelists do it to get easy effects. All
generations are a mess. Thank you."

“ Your generation," said Hilary thoughtfully,
“ has more opportunities for being a mess than
ours had. That's what I meant. And your chil-
dren will have more opportunities than you have.
There is a certain amount of horse-sense in the
reluctance of many young fellows nowadays to
having wives of their own. They're afraid of get-
ting it in the neck from the results. For whereas
you have motors and telephones and wireless with
which to lose your sense of the stabilities, as you
are losing them, they will have cheap aeroplanes
as well. When you people nowadays begin to

FOR PURITY!

89

break loose there’s no limit to your looseness.
There was in my father's time. They couldn't
get about so quickly. They couldn't grub about
in so many cesspools at one time, rushing in a
night between London and any vile paradise of the
vulgarities like Deauville or the present Riviera.
Even if they broke loose a little — the women,
I mean — they generally had to make some
compromise with the decencies simply because they
had to live in the place, they couldn't make an
appointment with a trunk-call to Paris and go
and have a few days' 1 fun ' there. But now if a
woman has kicked through every restraint of
caste and chastity there's the whole world open
for her to play the mischief in, there's every
invention in the world to help her indulge her
intolerable little lusts. ..."

I mastered an irrational impulse to try to defend
Iris against the friend of her childhood. I would
have liked to say that the little lusts were intoler-
able most of all to Iris. Hilary would almost have
sympathised with that in Iris, for it would seem
that the only vice a man of principle can under-
stand is the vice of not enjoying what he has
forfeited his principles to do. Hilary couldn't,
obviously, forgive Iris for not having grown common
and meretricious and, in the slim beastly sense,
coarse, as the other “ rotten ladies " did. He
couldn't, obviously, forgive her for the continued
graciousness of her outward seeming, and of her
inner seeming too, if one didn't know those things
about her. He couldn't obviously, forgive her
for being so indifferent to every distinction of class
that she was equally indifferent, with the whole
calm of her mind, to being “ declassed." And
he couldn't, obviously, forgive himself for still.

90

THE GREEN HAT

God knew how, seeing in her the same qualities
that he had seen in the long little thing, all brown
stockings and blue eyes. If only Hilary had been
a sentimentalist, and couM have closed his eyes
against what he did not wish to see and could have
opened his eyes to see all that he did wish to see !
But Hilary was a realist with a backward-seeing eye.
The Iris of long ago should have been dead, choked
to death by this grown-up Iris— but, and there lay
the perversity of this grown-up Iris who had kicked
through every restraint of caste and chastity, it
wasn't dead at all, she was still essentially the
same Iris who had walked with her governess up
South Audley Street. But, the devil, all these
men ! Yet there she was . . . profoundly in-
different, profoundly as though untouched by
any more soiling breath than that of the lightest
passage of the years. It was, you might hear
Hilary thinking, confoundedly unfair to all decent
womanhood. Iris's immunity in the abyss. He
should not like her — no, there should not be left
anything about her for a decent man to like. The
friend of Iris's childhood couldn't help a savage
anger with her for retaining the interest of a clean,
and otherwise quite balanced, mind. The friend of
childhood liked the woman so deeply that, being a
man of principle, he could see only her worst side.
And then the man of principle would fall into the
toils of the friend of childhood, and whilst the two
antagonists were wrestling together they could
see only the side of the woman that it made them
the most wretched to see. The very fact that
Hilary was deeply attached to Iris made him see
only her worst side. Many good men call that
"liking” a woman. Many good women call that
"idealism” in men.

FOR PURITY!

9 *

4

It is curious how many irrelevant details will
crowd back into the mind when one is trying to
reconstruct only the main passage of an evening,
which was throughout, now one looks back on it,
as though directed to its inevitable end. I re-
member how, through one of the long silences
common to our odd, antagonistic intimacy, I sat
staring into my brandy-glass — those Gargantuan
ones, Hilary had — and wondering at Hilary's, well,
unsentimental sentimentality; and then I won-
dered what sort of a fight the man of principle
would put up against the friend of childhood
should Iris ever show the faintest inclination to
take as her third husband Mr. Townshend of
Magralt. The man of principle would lose . . .
happily lose or unhappily, you could not tell, for
no man can tell what odd happinesses, more
secretly kept than crimes, another man will snatch
from intimacy with a woman whom he would
detest if he did not desire.

But through the silences of that evening there
walked mainly the figure of the legend of Boy Fen-
wick, a boyish figure midst a babble of confused
rumours and knowing silences. Yet I was so con-
cerned not to appear, to that watchful and dangerous
friend of childhood, too interested in Mrs. Storm,
that the name of Boy Fenwick hung long on my
lips before I was out with it. Oh, that name of
Boy Fenwick ! One knew it so well and so dimly,
it would so often be just dropped into a conversa-
tion by some friend of his or some friend of a friend,
just the name with a passing regret, to the per-
petuation of his charm and his time. . . .

92

THE GREEN HAT

Many will, no doubt, remember the details of
what must have been one among the minor sen-
sations of that time better than I can pretend to.
It happened during the summer of 1913, when I,
having just left school, was enjoying a first taste
of freedom up and down Switzerland, and was
far from the long arm of even the Continental
Daily Mail . Boy Fenwick was found, on the
dawn of his wedding-night, lying in the courtyard
of the Hotel Vendome in Deauville, dead of a
broken collar-bone. He had fallen, it appeared,
from his bedroom window on the third floor. His
beautiful young wife (I collect the bits of rumour
that came to me later) had been asleep, had sud-
denly awoken to a sharp feeling of solitude, had
happened to look out at the dawn. . . .

Tests were made, and it was found that a man
could, given certain conditions, have fallen out of
that window. The hotel management suggested
that a man could, given certain conditions, fall
out of almost any window. Among the certain
conditions suggested, tactfully, was champagne.
That was, I believe, adopted, tactfully. Much, of
course, must have been said and printed about
the beautiful girl Mrs. Fenwick; and there was
provided a little comic relief to the affair in the
scarcely suppressed indignation of the illustrated
papers, for the beautiful Mrs. Fenwick had in
some way prevailed on Sebastian Roeskin, the
photographer in Dover Street, not to issue any of
her photographs, and had shown a remarkable
ingenuity in evading the street-camera. And, the
tragedy happening at Deauville during the Grande
Semaine — Deauville at that time was still in the
first flush of its victory over Trouville — it was
hushed up as quickly as possible.

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93

Boy Fenwick had only that year come down
from Oxford, and his memory was treasured by
his many friends both there and in London. In-
deed, to one who heard of him only when he had
become legend, and when the first edition of a
slim book of poetry by him, published posthum-
ously with a charming introduction by P. L., had
attained to a price only surpassed later by Rupert
Brooke's memory, he appears to have been the
most beloved of the beloved young men of that
time. To youth of this decade, grown now a little
impatient of the careless wise-seeming pastime of
indulging “sound” scepticisms or catholic ideal-
isms, those youths of the days before the war must
seem to have been the most gifted of God's
creatures who ever walked this earth, always
excepting the glory that was Greece. Several,
to be sure, survive until this day, but nothing
could be more unjust than to approach a man's
youth in the light of the shadow that he casts in
his early thirties. Yet they would verily seem,
those few dead young men, to have a certain god-
like quality of immortality, denied to the multitude
that died with them and for whom cenotaphs and
obelisks and memorials must do duty for memory :
that they should retain the regret of their many
friends is not remarkable, but it is odd, and plea-
sant, how they will ever and again loiter, gay and
handsome and “ sound,” in the imagination of
those who never knew them. Boy Fenwick's
name, now, would ever and again pass like a
phantom of beauty and laughter across some con-
versation : so real, so dim. He had been notable,
it seemed — and this is the only clear thing I had
ever heard about him — for a certain catholic
idealism that was almost an obsession with him.

94

THE GREEN HAT

So, I was to think this night, thrusting from me
the legend of Boy Fenwick, so it would seem. An
idealist ! Yes, Boy Fenwick was an idealist. But
would I had the debonair truculence of that
puissant nobleman, the Earl of Birkenhead, who
has dared to say, in an age given over to the new-
rich snobbery of exalting plain, normal men :
“ I do not like meek men/' I, had I that presence,
would say : " I do not like idealists/*

Yet it was not to be over this dinner with Hilary
that I was to be given the full sum of the idealism
of that handsome young god who, beloved of
many, was the hero of one March and the fate of
another. That was to come much later, on a night
that was the sister of this night.

Mrs. Storm could have been no more than
nineteen or twenty at the time of that tragedy at
Deauville. And I suppose I must have remarked,
probably apropos of no tiling but Hilary 's passing
me the matches, how very terrible it must have
been for a young girl, for Hilary passed, through
one of those pregnant pauses which seem always to
preface the cruelties of kind people, his Gargan-
tuan brandy-glass round about his nose. “ And,"
he said thoughtfully, “ rather more terrible for
him, don't you think?"

“ I suppose/' I said in all innocence, “ that he
was tipsy or something, to fall out like
that. ..."

Hilary looked at me through his glass, for the
rim readied his eyebrows as he sipped, in that
way which is supposed, I believe, to make noisy
Labour interruptors fed such fools as even a clown
must despise.

“ But, Hilary," I couldn't help crying out,
“ you're not implying that he threw himself out 1 "

FOR PURITY!

95

Hilary, because I had given way to a moment’s
emphasis, gained instantly in leisured calm.
" Hm,” he said. Gently he put down his huge
glass. " Hm,” he said. He considered the stump
of his cigar, and decided that it was not worth
while relighting it “ Hm,” he said, and took
another from the box, pinching it. I passed him
the matches. “ Hm,” he said. But not I to be
provoked ! I did to him what Mr. Beerbohm
once so notably did to the late Mr. James Pethick
in the Casino at Dieppe : I plied the spur of silence.

“ Boy Fenwick,” said Hilary, lighting his cigar,
" was a young man of quality. I don't mean the
word in the llashy sense in which you use it in
your stories. But of quality — in mind and spirit.
And yet,” in a volume of white smoke he smoth-
ered the failing light of the match, “ he chucked
himself out of that window."

And, you know, just at that moment I saw him
doing that, and Iris lying in bed . . .

Hilary was angry. The very thought of that
buried tragedy seemed to wrench that inside tap
a little looser, but still the savage, hurt bewilder-
ment would not quite reach his skin.

“ Of course," I said, " they just said it was an
accident, then. ...”

“ Naturally,” murmured Hilary.

Naturally, Mrs. Boy Fenwick had not hurt her
husband’s name by saying publicly that he had
died of his own will. “ And then,” said Hilary,
“ you come to the upside-down morality of an
Iris March, the part of her that's steel and iron
and gold. She ruined herself, telling the truth.”

“ But,” I said humbly, " if you had preferred not
to think of her as ruined, need you have believed
that it was the truth ? ”

g6

THE GREEN HAT

" Iris/' said Hilary, " never lies. It bores her
One quite naturally gets into the habit of taking
everything she says literally : for it always will be
literally true, particularly if it's against herself.
She hasn't, you see, a trace of the self-preservative
instinct. line Pity."

Iris Fenwick couldn't, it seemed, endure for one
moment the idea that his friends should think that
Boy had fallen out in a moment of tipsy dizziness
— Boy being well known to be a very light drinker,
and Iris abominating drink, " the very idea of
drink," Hilary said, " as only the daughter of a
drunkard and the sister of a drunkard can. If
you ever get to know her at all well," he suddenly
smiled, “ you may be a little put out, in the natural
satisfaction of your thirst, by seeing Iris look just
a little, well, sulky. Unreasonable, yes. But they
get unreasonable about drink, daughters or sisters
or wives of drunkards."

Mrs. Boy Fenwick had seemed to feel most
deeply her responsibility to Boy's memory and to
his friends' love for him. She simply had, it
seemed, to safeguard the love they had for him,
by making it clear that he had died as he had
lived. In disenchantment of an ideal — that, if
Boy was to commit suicide at all, could be his only
possible justification. His suicide, as apart from
his death, naturally scarred his friends, but not so
deeply when they knew that it was done in the
despair of the disenchantment of an ideal. Boy's
friends would understand that completely, Iris
must have felt, for were they not Boy's friends?
He was sensitive even to madness — they could,
indeed they'd have to, think that. But that he
was given something to rouse his sensitiveness and
to overturn his balance — she had, Iris seemed to

FOR PURITY!

97

have felt, to tell his friends that, so that, in giving
Iris all the blame that was her due, they should
retain their memory of a Boy strong to the end in
idealism. And they seemed, I gathered from
Hilary, to have done that without stint. Hilary,
too — for wasn't he a realist, that man? One could
see them all at it, Boy's friends to Boy's widow —
the dead adored youth in their minds, the still,
pale, beautiful girl between them. She had to tell
Gerald. You can imagine that. . . .

She had, Hilary said, a quite unearthly beauty
just at that time, and was so still, so terribly un-
young somewhere inside her. “ It was my fault,"
she had said. She had been looking when he had
thrown himself out of the window. He had just
lit a cigarette, she said.

“ That a girl of that age," said Hilary, " that a
girl whose moral character, you can't help seeing,
was . . . well, what it was, should be so impelled
to tell the truth at her own expense, at the expense
of her own ruin, at the expense of a queer brother's
hatred, for that must have hurt her most of all,
by a sense of honour that would make even the
rigidity of a Guy look small, well "

“ But isn't that where, Hilary, there comes in
that ‘ caste ' which you complain of her having
always ignored?"

But Hilary wasn’t going back on any of his
words. A “ hm," and he was off, saying that it
made him think there was something in the stale
paradox that you never know the best about a
woman until you know the worst. " But, God in
Heaven, what a worst !"

She had wanted, Hilary tried to explain — pa-
thetically, you can see, trying to make clear to
himself the noble as well as the shady side of Iris

THE GREEN HAT

98

— to keep permanent, even to reinforce, the love
for Boy of Boy's friends by the idea that he had
died untamed of his ideal. You could see her,
Hilary said, meeting Gerald half-way on that.
" Boy died," she had said, " for purity."

" Hilary ! She said that ! "

And that, you know, was all that she had said I
Boy Fenwick had died " for purity." That was
all.

" It seems," I couldn't help thinking aloud,
" very sweeping. ..."

It was, Hilary said grimly — and very pointed,
in a girl not twenty !

" But ! " I murmured.

Boy's friends, Hilary said, could naturally put
only one construction on it. Naturally, Hilary
said. " For purity ! " And Iris's friends could
put no other. What, after all, didn't " for purity"
mean? It could mean, to all the decent people
of the world, but one thing. . . .

Hilary looked at me in inquiry. 1 had made a
noise. But I was so surprised. " You don't
mean," I tried not to gasp, " that you condemn
her on that for Boy Fenwick's death !"

"One doesn't," snapped Hilary, "‘condemn*
an Iris March, an Iris Fenwick, an Iris Storm.
They stand condemned in themselves. They are
outside the law by which we "

" Hilary, as the Girondins were put by the
Jacobins I"

" We're not perfect," said Hilary quietly, " but
we're not that . What Iris was at nineteen or so —
or before, evidently — she has been ever since."

" What, as brave I "

" As loose. She made a gesture after Boy's
death, a fine gesture — and then she set about

FOR PURITY!

99

proving how she had that in her to disenchant a
Boy to his death. She had . . . 4 affairs/ Not,
you know, one long affair . . . but ' affairs/
Oh, quite openly. You've no doubt heard about
some of them. And when four years later young
Storm married her, against his people's wishes,
she was no more than — well, what do you call
those people ? Demi-mondaines ? And since
Storm’s death ...”

“ But ! ” I said, and also I said what it was in
my mind to say, for are we sticks, are we stones,
or are we human? It was Boy Fenwick I was
thinking of, not of Iris’s life later, although it
seemed to me that Boy Fenwick had had a good
deal to do with that, too. I had begun by pro-
voking Hilary. He had, with that appalling talent
of his for appearing reasonable, provoked me.
He could arouse all that was worst in a man, could
Hilary. He had aroused all that was worst in me
against that young purity hero. It seemed to me
that it was, to say the least, rather hasty of a
young man to die “ for purity” in connection
with a girl of twenty. “ Hilary, in two thousand
years we have discovered only one caddish way
of getting to Heaven, and Boy Fenwick, like many
‘ idealists,’ has taken it.”

“ You probably don’t realise,” said Hilary, oh
reasonably, “ the depths of sudden despair — in
decent people.”

" But I thought we were discussing human
beings I ” And, as regards human beings, one
couldn’t help thinking that a girl who had con-
fessed that her lover had died " for purity” was
purer than the lover who had not been able to
live for it. Boy Fenwick’s death had an air of
getting away with rather a good thing. He had

100

THE GREEN HAT

destroyed the girl by exalting himself — for purity I
How did boys come to have the infernal conceit
of setting themselves up as connoisseurs of purity?
And he had taken care to leave his corpse in such
a position as best to foul the fountains of his young
widow's womanhood. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
ought to speak to him about it.

" Words ! ” said Hilary. " Words, words ! ”

" Well, we can’t all,” I pleaded, “ talk by throw-
ing ourselves out of windows. And I was brought
up to believe that it was caddish to sneak on a
woman, whether for purity or for humbug.”

" It was Iris,” said Hilary 7 , “ who sneaked on
herself.”

“ Only because, Hilary, she didn’t want the
young man to waste such a fine suicide. She didn’t
want to do him out of the glory of dying for true-
blue-manhood. At the age of twenty a girl is
justified in having a belief in true-blue-manhood.
But Mrs. Storm seems to have grown up since
then.”

Hilary indulged me. I was young. " Of
course,” he said, “ the boy wasn't quite sane. Hm.
But he loved Iris — you know, extravagantly — as
Hector Storm did later. Iris isn’t, it seems, one
of those women you love a little. And Boy loved
purity. And because, of course, the two simply
didn’t go together — the shock, man, of realising
that, to a boy in love ! — he went on his own way.
And I don’t think,” said Hilary, as though he was
trying hard to be fair to one, " that we should
sneer at the things men die for — even that young
madmen die for.”

In England, I reflected sulkily, you may not
apply the faintest touch of reason to any of the
accepted laws of life and death without being

FOR PURITY 1

IOI

accused of sneering. The accusation is invaluable
in puissance. It has made England what she is.
It at once stops all argument, all nonsense, all
sense, all thinking. So powerful is the effect
that the one accused, thinking that perhaps he
was sneering, at once checks his mind from further
thought on that line. The word creates a vacuum.
No one likes to be thought he is sneering — when
he was merely, for a change, thinking. It is like
being told you have no “ sense of humour.” It
damns you completely, because it makes you
damn yourself. And one of the reasons why
there can never be a Marxist revolution in England
is that the rebels will be told that they are sneering
at the King. They will be abashed.

" Seldom,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “ have I
known a man pull his weight less than you
are doing tins evening. Hm. I should try some
brandy.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Aphrodite

i

B 5JNE chapter can’t reasonably be expected
V to bear the weight of that night. We
W have so far built but the groundwork
ly of that night, and on that we have
now to shape a peculiar edifice, according
to the flimsy but saturnine manner of the third
decade of the twentieth century ; to which majority
the twentieth century has attained, as more austere
histories will tell you, only after the most un-
paralleled pains. Teachings, belchings and bellow-
mgs ; but we, taking a more private course, will
be more circumspect in our derangements.

We have, so far that night, seen Gerald Have-
leur March, by the way. We have seen his evening-
paper; but we have not read it. (Nor had Hilary
read his Evening Standard. He always “ glanced
at it,” he excused himself later on, as he was going
to bed. As I did, if ever.) We have, also by the
way, noted Cie presence in London of the car of
the flying siork. We have dined, and had some
brandy. V e have talked of purity, and discovered
an amiab'e dissonance in our views thereon. We
would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordi-
nary g'-me towards bed, for after dining with
Hilary one somehow always went straightway to
bed. That was why, Guy said cruelly, one dined

102

APHRODITE

103

with Hilary. The “hm”s seemed to soothe the
way thither. But that evening, however it
came about, I did not feel that I would like to
go straightway to bed. One has, I suppose,
moods.

But I can't account plausibly for the fact that
Hilary came with me to the Loyalty. Hilary did
not go to night-clubs. His moods took a more
exclusive course. He ignored night-clubs, and
thought he was ignoring the whole of folly. Not
so superior, I ! Wherefore it passed that I dis-
covered my mood to Hilary as we stood in the
hail of his house, for Hilary was accompanying
me to the door. Ross, red and silent and amiable,
stood somewhere about with my hat. Where we
stood, just without the door, the unusually warm
June night smiled kindly on us. There is not
much sky in London, but that little smiled on us
with a faint load of stars, and somewhere behind
the roofs there might be hanging a moon. There
might ? But there was such a pretty tilted
silver boat among the chimneys of Curson House !
From the small table in the hall Hilary had ab-
sently taken up the evening-paper, which was
folded in that way which tells you in the Stop-
Press News that Surrey has scored 263 for eight
wickets. He held it in his hand with that air of
one who has nothing left to do but read an
evening-paper. Grey and thoughtful and kind,
he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre
house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling
of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained
air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters
wear during their holidays. “ Hm,“ he said.
“Nice night. . .

“Hilary, why don't you come with me? It

104

THE GREEN HAT

won't probably be amusing, but we can always
come away. ..."

“ Dancing," he frowned. Hilary likes dancing,
really. Only, not being exactly supreme among
dancers, he never can understand how good dancers
may like dancing so much that they will dance
whenever they can. If Hilary had been a writer
he would have put very witty and biting bits about
dancing into his books. All writers have clumsy
feet.

I made to assure him that he would find him-
self in the most polite company, for the Loyalty
Club was notable as a relaxation for Government,
diplomacy, and princes of the blood. He “ hm’d "
viciously at that, but set out with me down Curzon
Street and through the noisome shadows of Shep-
herd's Market. Gerald’s light was on. But now
that I was not there to turn it out, when would
Gerald's light not be on ?

Through the deep cavernous artery of Whitehorse
Street we emerged on to Piccadilly, quiet as before
the storm that would at any moment break on
it from the theatres. Buses, their lights within
revealing the seats, fled madly as though from a
doomed city. Loitering taxi-cabs, attracted like
moths to a flame by walking silk-hats, came near
the curb, hung in doubt, loitered on.

I wondered whether she would be at the Loyalty.
She might. I wondered whether she could have
accepted the sacrifice of herself “ for purity "
without question, without bitterness. She would
— that “ Chislehurst mind ! " Oh, yes, she would
have agreed with that idealist's harshest judg-
ment — indeed, she had agreed with it so completely
that she had plucked two words from her heart
and given them to the world to whip her with.

APHRODITE

105

Boy Fenwick, you could see, had impressed him-
self like an anchorite’s scourge on the souls of the
twins. What was it she had said ? "It would
be nice to die for purity." Heavens, but wasn’t
she sickened of purity ! That pitiful, pitiless
moment in the bedroom of the Hdtel Venddme !
The messy kindergarten that men make of love,
and call it " romance," " idealism " ! Perhaps
Judas was the first idealist — that desperate, ex-
alted betrayal of the body to the soul. They
are so certain about their souls, your carnal
idealists ! Soul, soul, soul ! May their punishment
be to meet their souls face to face in the after-
world ! One could see that boy, a slim pyjama’d
figure by the window, a silhouette of cold fire with
the ruin of all mankind in his clean eyes, staring
through the meretricious dawn of Deauville
towards the goal to which he was exalted beyond
reason by his disenchantment. He had loved Iris,
madly. . . . But they do not love, those men!
They torture, and are tortured. They take love
as they might take a flower out of a garden, and
they torture it because it does not thrive so well
in the water of their tears as in the water of God's
good sense. They do not love, those men, they
stand in wonder before the power to love that is in
them. And theirs the pleasure of a spurious conceit,
theirs the pain of a spurious disenchantment.
If that boy had loved, he would have turned to-
wards the bed on which she lay, beaten, silenced,
a child groping for sense, for pity, for any reason-
able thing, and he would have tried to understand,
and maybe he would have 1 found the grace to
understand, that in her, despite and because of
the hungers of the body, there was that frightful
humility to an unknown purpose which makes the

G.JEL h

io6

THE GREEN HAT

limitless beauty of some women. But the boy
had lit a cigarette. . . .

"Don't we cross?" muttered Hilary, and we
crossed towards Jermyn Street, for the Loyalty
Club lies in Pall Mall, to the end that, in immediate
contact with the Royal Automobile Club, it may
at least boast, as might occur to a student of
Ruskin, a degree of eminence in the abyss.

One is, one can't help being, impelled by a sense
of decorum to disavow at once any connection
which may be fancied by worldly readers between
the Loyalty Club and the Embassy Club. Such
connection could not, of course, be fancied if the
Loyalty were so well known as the Embassy ; but
the Loyalty is, or was — yes, was — the daughter
of the Embassy, and although it is not yet so
well known to the people of the town, who shall
say that a daughter is not more of the mode than
her mother ? Even, life being what it is, in spite
of the mother.

The Loyalty sprang from the Embassy, and it
sprang in a polite direction, from Bond Street
down the hill of Saint James's to Pall Mall, where
it might lie over against Carlton House Terrace.
It sprang because certain persons of ton had found
that the Mother Society, while never ordered but
with the most polite amenities, was growing per-
haps just a little crowded with what-nots; had,
by banding themselves in a body financial and
social, founded the Loyalty; and were there assured
of more freedom for the exercise of a reasonable
exclusiveness since, the floor-space of the Loyalty
being large enough to accommodate only one
hundred and fifty dancers, the membership was
strictly limited to one thousand and five hundred.
Below were a swimming-bath and squash-courts,

APHRODITE

io 7

besides the more orthodox facilities; and while
the whole place was appointed with the severest
economy, if not with downright meanness, it
is well known that those who spend more than a
certain amount of money for supper, and see other
people spending as much, will need no other assur-
ance of being in surroundings of the first quality.
That is a well-known French invention, of which
England has only recently acquired the recipe.

The Loyalty Club can, however, claim no his-
torical notice but in the person of the Chevalier
Giulio di Risotto, its directeur du restaurant . We
need not interrupt ourselves here to envy the
salary at which the Chevalier was with difficulty
persuaded to leave his retreat at Rapallo; but
that he was worth it nobody can gainsay, for
wheresoever Risotto went he took with him his
invention. His invention he called V aristocratic
Internationale ; his name, you understand, for his
^people; they loved it.

A study of the lives of philosophers and states-
men will inform and ennoble the mind; but a
sideways glance at such a phenomenon as the
twentieth-century Risotto cannot help but make
it supple. One of the menials of all time, he is one
of the successes of ours; and a portent of the doom
of aristocracy in England. Born of Machiavelli by
Demoiselle Demi-monde, crafty, thin, pale, dry-
shiny as shagreen, he had walked to fortune
about every great restaurant in Europe, adding
always, but with discrimination, to his order
of V aristocratic international ^ ; and to bankruptcy
twice, of truly patrician magnificence, about the
baccara tables of his less inspired but more cautious
colleague, M. Comuch<§ of Cannes and Deauville.
The "creation” of the Loyalty Club must serve

108 THE GREEN HAT

his biographers as the pinnacle of Risotto's career.
V aristocratic Internationale was ultimately served
at last. Not an American was left on Fifth Avenue,
nor an Argentine in the Americas ; while Australian
fruit-farms deplored the absence of their masters,
and Canada adored the ton of her peerless million-
aires.

We had no sooner entered among the company
than Hilary was for going at once : but Risotto
having rewarded us with a sofa-table — for he and
Hilary had, as the saying is, been boys together
when Hilary had been attached to the Embassy
in Paris and Risotto was ennobling patrons of the
Ritz to V aristocracie Internationale — he and I pre-
vailed on Hilary to stay by ordering for him an
angel-on-horseback, to which he was notably
partial; while I, Risotto said, would have a had-
dock with a nice egg on it.

Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest
night-clubs, at once left me to dance with the
first acquaintance he saw. This was Mrs. Ammon.
Whereas I, in not dancing, was following an example
set by many present. We, we watched our elders
dance with each other's mothers, and for them
the band on the balcony played with a sensibility
approaching grief. There was no tune. But it
is absurd, this querulous demand of young people
for " tunes ! " Our fathers and our mothers
have done with “ tunes." Let there, our uncles
say, be a rhythm. Let there, say our aunts, be
syncopation. There was a rhythm. There was
syncopation. Grave, profound, unforgettable, there
was a rhythm. It had a beat like the throbbing
of an agonised heart lost in an artery of the Under-
ground. Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety
lay twined in it. They call this rhythm the Blues.

APHRODITE

xog

It reminded yon of past and passing things. It
reminded you of the days when people over forty
had still enough restraint not to crowd out every
ballroom and night-club with their dancing in
open formation, playfully aiming at each other's
tonsils with their feet. It reminded you of the
scent tangled in the hair of she with whom you
had last danced to that rhythm. You saw the
soft line of her face by your shoulder, the tender
pocket behind her ear, the absorbed excursion
of her breath through her nostrils, the dark eye-
brow over which you would lightly pass the third
finger of your left hand but that it would soil
the tip of it. You mourned the presence of the
dead. You mourned the memory of the living.
They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you
of regret. It reminded you of a small white face
suddenly thrown back against your arm with a
smile that disturbed the dance. It reminded you
of the desire that pleasantly turns to dust when
you are desired. It reminded you of things you
had never done with women you had never met.
You danced again at the Ambassadeurs at Cannes,
with the masts of yachts drawn ebony-black be-
tween the tall windows and the pale blue night
over the sea. The Lido lay like a temptation
before your mind, and the songs of the gondoliers
raved into the measure of whispering feet. The
Spanish King brushed by you at San Sebastian,
eating salted almonds, again you hesitated in the
dance at Biarritz to listen to the roar of the
Atlantic, and across a perfumed street in Seville
you again saw the shiver of a mantilla through the
cracked windows of a cabaret. You danced again
beneath the vermilion moon of Algeria, between
the American Bar and the pyramid-cypress tree.

THE GREEN HAT

1 10

You danced again in the Bois in Paris, the trees
like monstrous black pagodas against the night,
the stars brilliant as sequins on an archangel's
floating cloak, the magically white faces of women,
the lights in the night making love to the black
shadows in their hair, their lips red as lobsters,
their arm-pits clean as ivory, the men talking
with facile gestures, the whole tapestry of the
CMteau de Madrid like a painted fan against a
summer night. They call this rhythm the Blues,
which is short for a low state of vitality brought
about by the action of life on the liver. O Baby,
it's di vine!

That is what they say, our elders.

Astorias, chef d’orchestre, stood at rest by the
edge of the balcony, his violin under his arm, his
bow gently tapping the edge of a bowl of nameless
ferns that hid his feet. His negligence is informed
with depression, his poise leans on melancholy.
The Blues, that man knows. He seems to wonder
why he is there, why anyone is there, why
everyone is there. No one can tell him, so he goes
on doing nothing, lonely as a star in hell. He does
not toil, nor spin, nor play his violin. From the
crowded floor a woman, her face powdered brown,
her mouth scarlet as the inside of a pomegranate
in a tale by Oscar Wilde, beseeches him with an
arm black-gloved to the shoulder to continue to
play. He yields.

Nearby was a corner-table of eight young people.
Maybe they would dance later on. Suddenly one
of the girls would give a loud laugh, and then there
would be silence. Of the four young men one
looked as Richard of Gloucester might possibly
have looked, a little bent, a little sinister, and pale,
as though he had been reading a treatise on diseases

APHRODITE

in

far into the night before. They were four married
couples, and they had all been boys and girls
together, and they had a son and daughter apiece,
and they all went to the same dentist. The women
had white oval faces, small breasts, blue eyes, thin
arms, no expression, no blood : literally, of course,
not genealogically. One of them stared with wide
blue eyes right into people's faces, and blinked
vaguely. She was lovely. These eight young
people were very happy. They ignored every-
thing but themselves, in whom they were not very
interested. Presently a prince of the blood joined
them, there was a little stir for a minute or two, a
little laughter, and then he rose to dance with the
girl of the blind blue eyes. As she danced she
stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the ceiling.
She looked bored with boredom.

There were many green dresses : jade-green,
October green, rusty green, soft green, sea-green,
dying green, any shade of green that would suit
the expiring voices of formal women in a garden
by Watteau. There were thirty-nine green dresses.
There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the wrong
sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus
whose head had been dipped in dressing and then
put in a warm place to dry. She dried in patches.
A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her
bosom to her throat, and she said to Mr. Trehawke
Tush, the novelist : “ The only decent cocktails
you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar, but the
people are so odd. My Archie wants to stand for
Parliament. What do you think ? ” Mr. Tre-
hawke Tush, portraits of whose pre-war face must
be familiar to everyone, was the most successful
of the younger novelists, and had earned from
Miss Rebecca West the praise that he was " the

1 12

THE GREEN HAT

leader of the spats school of thought/’ Mr. Tre-
hawke Tush will go down to history as* the
originator of Pique as a profitable literary idea.
He had hit on the discovery that English library
subscribers will wholeheartedly bear with any racy
and illegal relation between the sexes if the same
is caused by Pique. He had observed that the
whole purpose of a “ best-seller " is to justify
a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of
suburban matrons. He had observed that in no
current English novel was there ever a mention
of any woman having a lover because she wanted
a lover : she always took a lover because some-
thing had upset her, as in real life she might take
an aspirin. Mr. Trehawke Tush had then created
Pique, and was spoken of as a “ brilliant feminine
psychologist/* Since the rise of Mr. Trehawke
Tush no reviewer will take any count of a writer
as a " brilliant feminine psychologist ” unless
he can explain the regrettable adultery of his
leading female character by the word Pique. This
will also persuade Punch reviewers to consider the
tale wholesome. Mr. Trehawke Tush was up to all
those dodges. He said i “ I have just finished a
serial for The Daily Sale . I want to show up this
kind of thing, the waste, the Indecency of it. All
these girls. I thought the editor might take
objection to certain passages, as there is some
strong bedroom stuff in it, but he only asked me to
change one thing. I had put ‘he kissed her
where he would/ and so I changed it to ‘ as he
would/ ”

In a comer far across the crowded room sat
Venice Pollen, most sedately between her father
and her mother. We waved, and decided that it
was too crowded to dance ; but we did not know.

APHRODITE

113

Venice and I, that we were met that night in
darkness.

Observe Venice. We will always be found on
Venice's side, and why ? because she is a darling.
Mark her now, and how the smoke about her clears,
how clean she is, and so excited 1 For Venice !
You know she is excited because she is so still,
there between her hard father and her monstrous
fat mother. Mark her there, a green flower with a
mad golden head. And her eyes are blue, mad
blue, and she is the queen of ten thousand freckles,
of which she is very contemptuous, saying : Who
wants freckles ? ” And she had a noble forehead
which would crinkle when she did not catch what
vou said, and that was often enough, for she was
always talking herself. “ Darling, darling, darling 1 "
That is what she would say. And on her lion's-cub
head was a tumult of short dusty-gold hair, which
was by nature rebellious, so that she must ever and
again be giving her head a fierce backward shake,
as though that was going to do any good. Mark
her there, so sedate between her hard father and
her monstrous fat mother. Not sedate really,
Venice 1 Yet she must be sedate now, for Venice,
who by ordinary knew not fear, was as though
fascinated by fear of her father, who was none
other than Nathaniel Pollen, once of Manchester,
but now of Hampshire and Berkeley Square, for
was he not as rich as Croesus would have been
had Croesus owned the half of the newspapers of
England ?

So there sat Venice, most excited-still, undoubtedly
waiting for Napier. They were lovers, Napier and
Venice, and in three days they would be married.
Dark, shy, handsome Napier I Favourite of the
gods, you might well call him, yet his was that rare,

THE GREEN HAT

114

surprising quality which will keep a man poised
in continual sunshine, which will never let him
droop and laze in the certainty that his sins of
omission and casualness will be forgiven him. He
was, to talk for a change of the things that matter,
in the Foreign Office, and worked conscientiously
hard at a career which would — •“ undoubtedly,"
they said, “ undoubtedly " — in the course of time
place Napier among the most honoured of the
nation's servants ; although he would — " undoubt-
edly," one can't help feeling, “ undoubtedly " —
reach in the course of time the very same pinnacle
if he did no work at all, for England and America
are the only two countries left in the world wherein
men's charm and good looks are really appreciated
by men in the political, high financial, diplomatic,
and educational spheres.

Our table faced the swing-doors across the
room, and through the crowd of dancers one could
see who passed in and out. There was a press of
young men standing vaguely by the door, perhaps
doubtful whether they should stay or go to return
another day. A very haughty and flushed-looking
lady, expensively dressed in a dernier cri, which she
wore like armour, tramped past them, looked
suspiciously into their bland faces, and out. She
suspected they might be thinking she was going to
more than powder her nose. They were, she was,
who cared ?

A voice rose above the saxophone at the table
to the left of mine. It came from a heavy, droop-
ing man with the eyes of a schoolboy, the smile
of a genius, the gestures of a conqueror, and the
face of a bully. He said : “ There are two things
in England that not even God could afford to be
truthful about : Himself and the Navy." With

APHRODITE

US

the man of destiny was the most beautiful woman
in Ireland (Ulster) and a dark woman with a high
bust and flashing eye, who spoke Cockney with an
American accent. Her father was a lord. She
said : “ I am growing to detest London. There is
nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get
there . 0 The most beautiful woman in Ireland
(Ulster) had hair as black as a raven's wing and two
aquamarines for eyes, while the symmetry of her
features appalled the epithet. She said : “ I took
my little Juno out to tea with Fay Avalon to-day
and she was so naughty on the handsome parquet
floor, the mother's darling ! "

Then things happened. Gerald happened.
Gerald and Aphrodite. . . . Venice, Iris, Guy
de Travest, Hugo Cypress, Napier, Colonel Duck,
Gerald ... if only one had a cinema for a moment !
And there was also my Lady Pynte, with whom I
should have been dancing. Where Mrs. Ammon
went there also went Cornelia Pynte, and where
Lady Pynte went there also went Angela Ammon.
They were fine hearty women. And since Hilary
was dancing with Mrs. Ammon I ought instantly
to have begged the honour of taking the floor
with Lady Pynte. There she sat, across the
room, alone, a fine hearty woman. But, then,
one goes to a night-club to think, to be alone, to
be comfortable, to eat a haddock. Lady Pynte
thought dancing Good Exercise, and she was taller
than me, too. A fine woman. Once, as Hilary
toiled by with Mrs. Ammon, he whispered fiercely
over her shoulder : " Why don't you dance with
the old trout ? ° But I drowned discourtesy to
Lady Pynte in wine, for it was a “ late night" at
the Loyalty, which meant that you could drink
wine until they took it from you. Lady Pynte

THE GREEN HAT

116

was renowned as one of the five best women riders
to hounds in the country. It was said that the
foxes in the Whaddon Chase country ceased laugh-
ing when anyone said “ Pynte !" near them. But
Lady Pynte also had her politics, and she headed
Movements; while Angela Ammon was more of a
literary turn. Lady Pynte liked young men to Do;
Mrs. Ammon to Dare. Lady Pynte liked young
men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon
preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked
Boys to be Boys; Mrs. Ammon didn't mind if they
were girls so long as they were Original. Lady
Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the
People at Large and Not just Our Own Little Class,
she played bridge with a bantering tongue and a
Borgia heart, she maintained that the best place
at which to buy shoes was Fortnum & Mason's,
and if she saw you innocently taking the air of a
sunny morning she would say : “ You look not
at all well, my good young man. Why don't you
take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought
to be Riding." That was why one maintained a
defensive alliance with one's haddock rather than
do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte.
She would say one ought to be riding, and for four
years I had hidden from Lady Pynte the fact that
I did not know how to ride. I simply did not dare
to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride.
I had already tried to pave the way to that
denouement by confessing that I came from the
lower classes, but she did not appear to think
that any class could be so Low as that. She would
show one round her stables, and one felt an awful
fool standing there in the cold being expected to
be intelligent about the various horses, whereas
one could only mutter, " Ah, good horse 1 ” or

APHRODITE

117

" Oh, there's a fine horse!" until one day I re-
membered what Peter Page, the critic, had once
told me, that whenever he was shown a horse by
a horse-lover he would instantly say " What
withers I " and thus create a sound and manly
impression as a horse-fancier. But when I came
out impressively with " What withers ! " I thought
that Lady Pynte looked at me suspiciously, and
Hilary, who was also fancying horses with us, told
me later that it wasn't done to look a lady straight
in the eye and say " What withers I " Horses
make life complicated, that is what it is.

Hugo Cypress, dancing by with his wife Shirley,
called out : "Ho, there! Seen the evening-paper?
Friend of yours. ..."

"What?" I said. "Hugo. ..." But what
on earth was this about the evening-paper? I
was agitated — suddenly, I was very agitated in-
deed. There is something quite beastly about
evening-papers, beastly and naked. . . .

Astorias stayed his men, and Hilary came back
to the table. Gloomily he looked at the angel that
was frozen to its horse. And he looked worried.

" Hilary, what's this I heard Hugo murmuring
about the evening-paper ? "

"Gerald," said Hilary. " Hm. ..."

"But what, Hilary? Not serious, surely?"

" Oh, not serious," Hilary grunted. " Not
serious. Hm. Just a nasty silly mess, I think.
Didn't catch what. Hm. ..."

I realised then that I had known all the time.
That curious, hopeless grinning. . . . But, good
Lord, what sort of a mess? Hilary didn't know.
" Something in the evening-paper," he said. Hilary
looked hurt, worried, and 1 had that jumpy feeling
that I must do something at once. But what sort

THE GREEN HAT

118

of a mess? A drunkard's row? What? Hilary
didn't know, and I was just about to ask the
waiter if he could find me an evening-paper when
two figures by the door held my eye. And a third
just behind them. . . .

" Kids ! ” murmured Hilary, with a sort of
grudging smile. And they looked just that, for
all their beauty — " kids." One saw them playing
together under a tree. A long while ago, they had
played together under a tree. The favourite of
the gods and the shameless, shameful lady. . . .

" Hm,” grumbled Hilary. “ imitation. ..."

But I knew, for I once had a friend who was a
taxidermist. There were 396 white ermines round
Iris. White and tawny and white. She was like a
light, and you hadn't realised what an infernal
dungeon the place was until the door had suddenly
opened and she had come in, wrapped in cloth of
soft snow hoy's head, curly head, white and tiger-
tawny. She was like a light, a sad, white light.
I can't describe her but like that. Napier had been
standing by the door, waiting for the dance to
cease, so that he might join Venice. Then Iris had
come in, grave, very unself -conscious. She didn't
see Napier. He didn't see Iris. Her companion
was Colonel Duck, M.F.H.

" God, that man ! " sighed Hilary. Oh, Iris was
hopeless ! Why, of all men, Colonel Duck ?

Napier made to walk away. Iris and Colonel
Duck made to follow Risotto. Maybe one of the
396 white ermines just brushed Napier's sleeve.
Maybe this, maybe that. "Kids!" said Hilary.
Napier had started round, looked blank : tall,
slender, dark-haired, dark eyes always fevered
with a fear of you could never tell what — they
almost blinked now, you thought, at the light that

APHRODITE

119

Iris was, and she with her pools of eyes simply
blazing with surprise and an unsure smile parting
the painted mouth. "Napier!” "Iris!” As
though, you know, someone with a soft " There ! ”
had turned a tap somewhere. They smiled
completely. Well, they would, the old friends.
Naturally. She wouldn't, I was sure, be calling
him " Naps,” and she detesting abbreviations and
the like.

The wrong sort of Jewess gave a short, audible
outline of Iris to Mr. Trehawke Tush. Hilary
stared at her venomously. Then he stared across
the room at Colonel Duck venomously. Colonel
Duck stood behind Iris's white shoulder, a red
dragon of a man, smiling relentlessly with his
well-known geniality. Napier did not appear to see
Colonel Duck, M.F.H. Napier and Iris were talking
very quickly, laughing, maybe rather shyly. Then
Astorias, refreshed, hurled his men against the
conversation; bravely it held on for a second or
two, then lay shuddering and shattered, and gone
was Napier, gone Iris towards a table with Colonel
Duck, whose red, relentless geniality showed no
hint of the certain fact that the next time he was
at that talkative club of his he would say that
Napier Harpenden had been another of Iris
Storm's "affairs” and might quite well be again.
Iris Storm being what she was. Notably good at
all games and sports was Colonel Duck, M.F.H. ,
and therefore tolerated with respect by decent men.

“ I wonder if she knows anything about Gerald,”
I was saying, when from her table across the room
she seemed to be beckoning. To Hilary, not to
me. She looked very serious. The emerald shone
on the third finger of her right hand. She did
not appear to see me. I felt bitter.

120

THE GREEN HAT

“ Hra,” growled Hilary. He wanted to be
persuaded to go. He wanted to go reluctantly.
“ Hate that Duck man so,’’ he said pathetically.

“Go on, Hilary. She might know something.
I’ll get a paper ”

“ Why, there’s Gin ! ” said Hilary. “ Must have
just come up from Mace. There, by the door. . .’’

The carpi t of colours, on which the men were
sprinkled like black smuts on a town garden,
swayed between us and the doorway, but no
crowd might hide that man, for he was tall as a
tree and his crisp yellow hair glared like a menace
above the intervening heads and his frozen blue
eyes petrified smoke, noise, and distance. Hilary
was standing, about to go towards Iris. He looked
rather sheepish at being found by Guy at the
Loyalty. Most unsmiling was Guy that night.

“ Ross must have told him we were here,” I
said. “ He’ll have come about Gerald. . . .”

“ This foul place ! ’’ Hilary snapped. “ You
go downstairs with Guy, and I’ll get Iris to rid
herself of her fancy friend and bring her down. ...”

APHRODITE

tzt

2

And that was how, soon after midnight that
night, I found myself for the first time in the car
of the flying stork. For the first time. . . . Iris
had dropped her boyish-looking chauffeur in the
course of the evening, because, she said, she only
liked driving at night, when the air blew clean and
chill. She drove with assurance, that is to say,
she drove as though her mind was not in the same
world as the steering-wheel. The great bonnet
swept round by the squat Palace and up the slope
of Saint James's Street, which only by night may
remember a little of the elegance it has long since
forfeited by day.

41 But that's not the point," I remember saying.
“ He won't care a button what anyone else is
thinking about it. He’ll just go mad at the
humiliation in himself, hell worry it, making a
mountain of sordidness. ..." I had told her
that Gerald had sent her his love, and her eyes had
lit up at that, and she had laughed, shyly. “ That's
better," she had said, and now she said 2 “ Yes,
that's the point. He's proud, proud as Lucifer
. . . and such a baby ! Oh Gerald, you sensitive
beast ! I'm going abroad to-morrow, and he must
either come with me or he must join me quickly,
quickly. You'll persuade him, too, won't you ? "
I did not say that, if I knew Gerald, he would
probably be in a state far beyond persuasion.
But, I thought, there was no harm in trying to see
him.

At first, when Guy had told me downstairs at
the Loyalty, I had just laughed. It seemed so
absurd, fantastic. Gerald had been arrested in
u.H. x

122

THE GREEN HAT

Hyde Park for "annoying women!'* It was, yon
can see, unbelievable. How could Gerald "annoy ’ 1
a woman, Gerald who was so shy that he could
never even speak to one? " But there it is,"
said Guy.

Perhaps it is because that was the last time I
was ever at the Loyalty, but I remember the
most irrelevant details and the vivid way each
one of them seemed to impress some part of my
mind. Guy and I stood in the deserted Bar.
Through the open door at the far end came the
clean, somehow biting tang of a marble swimming-
bath : a faint splash now and then, a rustle of
water, a boyish American voice calling sharp and
loud : " Dive, you Julie, dive and get it over !

You've got no hips, kid, and you can't drown
without hips. I want to go eat some food."
Then, I remember, Billy Swift walked intently
past us, towards the Cloak-room. He comes to
mind vividly because that was the last time I
saw Billy Swift alive. His thin, lined, scarlet face
glowed with the health-giving breezes that pene-
trate into comers of clubs and restaurants where
men sit drinking brandy; his blue eyes always

E eered eagerly and kindly at you, as though he
ad something of the first importance to say.
He said, very hoarsely : " There’s a boy up there
dancing with two wooden legs. Good boy, I call
him. Good-night." And in a minute or two he
repassed us, walking intently, his crimson grey-
haired head, immaculate in every detail, sticking
like an old fighting-bird’s out of the wide astra-
khan collar of the coat that he always wore
against the midnight chill. Two months later he
was found on the cliffs near Dover with that head
beaten in, and someone was hanged. Billy Swift

APHRODITE

123

wouldn’t have had him hanged. " My fault,” he
would have said hoarsely. " My fault, chaps.”

" But there it is,” Guy said thoughtfully.
" Sickening, isn’t it ? Might appeal, of course. . .

" He’ll not appeal,” I said. Imagine Gerald
" appealing” against a five- pound fine for "inde-
cently annoying” a woman in Hyde Park!

Guy always spoke low, he murmured in a chill
voice, but you could always hear every word he
said. Not that you didn’t, after a while, know all
his words by heart, for Guy’s was one of those
vocabularies that a classical education is supposed
to have expanded As he spoke he would always
be looking at some point just above the crown of
your head.

" Sony about that boy,” he was saying
thoughtfully. " He’s had no luck. And this
Hyde Park business might happen to anyone
nowadays. ...” He looked down at me sud-
denly from that height of his, and I was, as always,
surprised by the profound childishness winch would
suddenly sweep the ice out of the blue of those eyes.

" Beasts,” he went on, almost pathetically.
"But aren’t they — those Park police? Arresting
nice old clergymen, Privy Councillors, anyone, just
because a poor old boy who’s been brought up too
well feels like having a word or two with a sicken-
ing woman. I mean., you need toq>edo-netting
around you to get round the Park in safety nowa-
days. Well, don’t you? And now they plant
poor young Gerald. I’m sure, aren’t you, that these
police put the women there on purpose as — what
d’you call them?”

" Agents provocateurs ?**

" Weil, have it your own way. But I’ve been
watching the police round about here lately, and

124

THE GREEN HAT

of coarse they're mostly very good fellows, the
best, but the police round the Park are quite a
different lot. id like to kick them for the way
they look those poor devils of women up and down
as though they were dirt. I never thought much
of the type of sneak who went for the Military
Police during the war, and these fellows seem
rather like that. Anything for an arrest and
promotion." He smiled faintly. Guy's eyes
seemed always to get most frosty when he smiled.
“ I once promoted some of them the wrong way
for being inhuman. Inhuman, that's what these
blighters get if you don't keep an eye on them.
And these Park fellows seem somehow to have
got spoilt since the war. I mean, it just looks
like that to an outsider. Good Lord, you've got
to have laws and to keep laws, but you needn't
set a lot of dirty sneaks at the Bolshevik game
of ruining gentlemen just for being silly old asses."

I stared at the one black pearl that from time
immemorial had stained Guy's shirt-front, which
somehow seemed to fit him as no one else's ever
could. Guy was easy to listen to, because you
always knew what he would say and how he would
say it. (He had an enormous reverence for any
man of the smallest talent, any man “ who did
things with his brain.")

“ T saw him for a minute this evening," I said.
“ He seemed rather queer, but he said nothing
about it. ..."

“ But imagine the young devil ! This business
happened one night last week, and he doesn't then
come to see you about it — or even Hilary or me,
because, of course, I'd have done all I could for
him, for old Barty's sake as well as because he
behaved himself in the war. I mean, this will almost

APHRODITE

125

kill old Eve Chalice when she sees it in the morning
papers. It's her Fm sorry for, for she's always
been fighting this sticky patch in the March brood
— first her eldest brother, old Portairley, then
her younger brother, Barty, then her niece Iris,
and now young Gerald comes along to make the
poor old dear cry her eyes out again. God, the
vileness of it ! Picking up odd women in parks.
I haven't got a paper with me, but you ought
to see the vile way they put down every beastly
detail, and you can see as clear as anything
that it was more bad luck and childishness
on Gerald's part than anything else. But, good
Lord, what's the matter with the man ! I mean,
one simply doesn’t go into th^ Park for women !
The accuser, or whatever you call them, was a
woman called Spirit, and in evidence two plain-
clothes men and a constable. I'm going to have
an eye kept on Mrs. Spirit, just to see all's fair
and square. I mean, it's beginning to look as
though the law was the ass that St. George forgot
to kill while he was showing off with that sickening
dragon. This Mrs. Spirit said — wish I had a paper
— that she was sitting on a bench waiting for her
brother, when Gerald sat down beside her and
made 1 indecent * proposals. Whereupon she was
so shocked — and she a grown-up married woman,
too — that she jumped up like a scalded cat and
let out some sickening howls, and up come the
police. Now you can't help thinking they were
waiting behind a tree with old Spirit as a bait,
can you? and caught young Gerald instead of a
Dean. . . . They’d get more promotion, I
shouldn't wonder, for a Dean. ..."

And as Guy spoke I saw Gerald glancing at the
evening-paper on the curb of Curzon Street, and

r 26

THE GREEN HAT

I saw him suddenly throw back his head and laugh
at the heavens. . . .

Gerald, Gerald ! The despiser of the world
caught by the meanest trap of the world's unrest.
The worshipper of the hero who had died 44 for
purity " figuring in the filthy columns of the cheap
Sunday Press as another peer's nephew gone
wrong. Gerald, starved of life, Gerald who knew
no woman, Gerald who wrote the tale of a man
who had lived 14 for purity " . . . and he had sat
down beside a woman called Spirit on a bench
in Hyde Park. Those nightmare women who
rave in the minds of lonely men, soft women
marvellously acquiescent, possible, the woman
Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, silent as
marble, but acquiescent . . . and Aphrodite had
dwindled into Mrs. Spirit, who was sitting waiting
for her brother in Hyde Park, and the law lurking
nearby to give the Sunday papers 44 copy/* And i
saw Mr. Auk in an angle* of the little tunnel, telling
a friend of his something funny about Gerald. . .

44 It makes one just sick, Guy. Sick.

44 Now look here/' Guy murmured, tapping my
shoulder with one finger. 44 Don't, you waste any
time being sick just now, but go round and see the

young d^vil "

44 I'm going straight away."

44 Bright boy. And just . . . Oh, tell him it's
all right and not to be an ass all his life. Tell him
we’re all on his side, and if there's going to be any
being sick that we're all going to be sick together
and in one corporate body, or words to that effect.
Poor young devil. And I know he'll be feeling
this, because I had a sort of eye on him in France,

and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string "

“ And drink's made him worse now. He's

APHRODITE

127

almost certain to be nearly speechless to-night.
But 111 see.”

“ Lord, O Lord, what a mess Barty left behind
him 1 But you see what I mean ? All you've got
to tell young Gerald is not to make a mountain of
this in his mind, as it’s the sort of thing that might
happen to anyone who is ass enough to go into the
Park at night without an escort, and you never
know but they mightn't one night anest the Bishop
of London himself for saying ‘ How do ' to his
aunt. .

Now I have read in books about people “ sail-
ing" into places, and I suppose Iris came into the
deserted Bar like that. Hilary must have been
just behind her, for I heard his voice, but I only
saw Iris, and I remember how she seemed to hold
the white ermine round her with one clenched hand,
and how the great emerald shone like a green
fly on the soft, soft white. And the tawny curls
danced their formal dance on her cheeks as she
came towards us, swiftly, oh swiftly, saying, in
that suddenly strong, clear voice : “Oh, Guy . . .
and friend of Gerald ! Will you help me, dear
friend? I want to go round to see Gerald, and
Hilary says you still have the key of the house.
I went hours ago, but could get no answer at the
door. I wonder, would you come with me ? "

" Iris," said Guy sternly, and I remember the
way she threw back her head to look at him, and
I thought again of the queer, unconscious way she
had of always meeting men on their own ground.
“ Why don't you ever look up your old friends
when you're in London, Iris ? Or aren't we your
old friends ? Or is that fine representative English
gentleman, Colonel Duck, your old friend ? Answer
me yes or no~"

128

THE GREEN HAT

“ Oh, Guy ! " she said softly, sadly. " I wouldn't
have you be a humbug. I wouldn't have you
and Hilary be humbugs — you two, out of all the
world/'

" But, honest, Iris, I'd like to see you. Ask
Hilary. 'Where's that girl got to?' I asks, and
he says ' hm/ says he, if you see what I mean."

“ Whereas I, Guy, have learnt not to regret old
friends. I’ve become an old woman on my travels,
and one of the first things an old woman must
learn is that the best way to keep old friends is
not to see them, for then you can at least keep
the illusion that they are friends . . . which
is, perhaps, a little different from being ‘ old
friends ' . . ."

“ Iris, don't be so bitter ! " snapped Hilary.
That, I thought, came rather well from Hilary.
Just at that moment a woman screamed from
the swimming-bath, there was a resounding splash.
Guy was saying : “ You'd better take Gerald

away for a while, Iris."

“ If he'll only come," she said, “ that's what I
want to do. ..."

I remember thinking just then that I mustn't
forget to thank her for that beautiful notepaper,
and also to ask her what was that last word in her
note.

" I've got an idea," Hilary was saying, in the
specially detached voice he keeps for ideas, " that
now we are in this foul night-club we might as well
do a bit of good. There's old Pollen upstairs, and
we might . . . hm, well, perhaps not."

° Perhaps not what, Hilary ? "

“ Hm. I was thinking of Eve seeing the thing
in to-morrow morning's papers. She only reads
one wretched picture-paper, and that's Pollen's,

APHRODITE

xag

so I thought, hm, that if we asked him not
to . . ."

"Eve, the poor darling!" Iris whispered. We
seemed to be in a desert, three shadows of men,
three shadows of voices, and Iris, very white and
alight. That is how I always remember her, alight.

" No good, Hilary," Guy was murmuring. " He
won’t, because it’s what those fellows call News.
And if you try you will only upset young Venice
and make her perhaps feel she’s in the other camp,
rather the wrong camp for her, she might think,
and just as she’s marrying Naps. She’s a good
girl, loyal as anything to her father — and he’s a
good fellow enough, but he’s got a queer complaint
called Consistency. It’s something you make
money out of, I think. I know him very well, as
I’ve blackballed him from three clubs. My God,
ever seen the man’s jaw?"

" She’s lovely, I thought," Iris said.

"Good girl, Venice. ..."

“ Hell ..." said Iris suddenly, breathlessly.

"What?" Hilary jumped.

“ Only . . . hell is raving with millionaires
with jaws like Mr. Pollen's. I’ve dreamt, I know.
People who snap 'Yes’ and ' No’ very brusquely
and then stick to it, no matter what it is. This
century likes them like that. Come along, my
friend, come along ! "

And in a trice Iris and I were walking up the
long passage which connects the Loyalty Club to
the pavement of Pall Mall. On one side it is hung
(but this is two years ago) with glass cases laden
with fine cut jades and ambers, while small blue
and green figures of animal men, human animals,
and bestial gods will delight the eyes of Egyptolo-
gists: on the other the faces of beautiful women

THE GREEN HAT

130

and children will testify to the photographic
art of Sebastian Roeskin of Dover Street. Iris
walked swiftly, heroically, her *-yes intent before
her, impersonal, utterly unself -conscious. The
glaring lights in the passage lit hei swiftly- moving
green-and-silver shoes, or were they sandals with
high heels? and so intent were the flippant silver-
flashing ankles, briskly striding on, as though
chiming the never-to-be-known marching song of
a lady who must always meet men on their own
ground.

She said : 41 You 11 be wondering how I came to
dine with a man like Victor Duck. Well, Eve been
wondering myself. Poor Victor Duck. He has
taken to caddishness like a drug, and he goes on
increasing the doses. It's almost fascinating to
watch, just to see what inevitable things he will
say next. And he said and did them all, every
one, even to 'Dear little girl' and to ordering a
private room. Hut I said I never dined in private
rooms on Fridays."

There was a group of tall young men at the
entrance, maybe waiting for their women from the
Cloak-Room, mavbe waiting for sirens to come to
them from the night, maybe waiting for taxi-cabs*
maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young
men will. Admirably formal thev looked, ad-
mirably toned to the dress-coats of Davies, the
trousers of Anderson and Sheppaid, the hats of
Lock, the waistcoats of Hawes and Curtis, the
ties of Budd. Handkerchiefs by Edouard and
Butler. The glory to God. They looked furtively
at Iris in the way that decent men will at a woman
who is said to have had lovers, like cows at a bull.
One of them said gloomily 1 “ Might go to the
Albert Hall Ball."

APHRODITE

131

Pall Mall seemed wrought of stately marble
palaces, and Iris said that the reason why so many
English people seemed to prefer Paris to London
was that English people saw Paris mostly at night,
while if they could see enough of London by night
they would never leave it. “ And the people!"
she said. " All these years I've spent abroad,
and never met any people so good, so decent, as the
English. Couldn't you sometimes kill people for
the quality of their admiration? Oh, I’ve com
mitted so many murders in foreign streets. . .

" But, if you like England . . . why are you
going away? You're free. . , ”

“ Ah,” she mocked, and, as we walked, a hand
darted out from her white cloak and touched
my sleeve, and startled me very much, 0 Wait
till you're so free that you just daren't do what
you like. Wait till you’re so free that you can be
here one minute and there another. Wait till
you're so free that you can see the four walls of
your freedom and the iron -barred door that will let
you out into the open air of slavery, if only there
was someone to open it. Ah. yes, freedom. . . .”

Then up the street of ghostly dandies we flew
behind the silver stork, and the wind rushed down
from Hampstead Heath and the wind ran out of
Jcrmyn Street and jumped like a drunken man
on the tawny cornstalks that were her hair, and
waved them about and danced with them. But
not she to notice, she who seemed to have a great
talent for just not noticing things ! She was silent,
serious, intent. The light of an arc-lamp kissed
the long slender legs into silver.

Once she turned to me, smiled, and looked
away again. I wondered if she meant me to see
that our friendship was in that smile. I hated

THE GREEN HAT

* 3 *

her, I think, because she made me feel so incap-
able, unwise. As the stork, with scarcely a rustle
of its wings, flew towards the Christian Science
Chapel at the head of Half-Moon Street, she said :
“ I'm tired. All day seeing lawyers and trustees,
and then taking sweet old Eve ail round and
round Selfridge’s because she had never been
there before and someone had told her she could
find everything she wanted there. And she was
quite upset at being unfaithful to Harrod's. . . .
And Gerald ! Oh, but why couldn't they let Gerald
alone I Just because, I suppose, the Marches are
never let off anything. . . ."

“ Here we are," I said, and she pulled up beneath
the lamp by The Leather Butler in East Chapel
Street. From the footboard a lane of low houses
and shops stretched in a vague, squalid line
towards the open Market Place at one end and the
darkness of the mews at the other; somehow like
an etching in a clouded light by an uncertain
hand. Bits of newspapers and tom placards, the
nameless odours of yesterday's economies. The
wind that came from Hampstead Heath could find
no way into Shepherd’s Market, and it lay still as
a tramp sleeping. Cats watched us intently from
the middle distance, and a striped cat leapt with
a scream from the shadow of the door of my old
house. Gerald's light was on. “ What's that
mean?" Iris whispered. She seemed to be
frightened, and she said sharply : “ Why are you
looking at me like that?"

“ I was just thinking," I told her, 44 that if one
could judge by appearances, which of course one
must never do, in that white cloak in this mean
lane you look as nearly an angel as this world
could ever see."

APHRODITE

133

“ Don't let's mock the angels. What does it
mean, Gerald's light being on?"

“ Only what it has always meant, that I must
turn it out."

" Ah, you've been very good to Gerald. . .

And I am glad that, just then, I said that I was
very fond of Gerald.

Then we were on the narrow landing of my old
flat, in the darkness. The musty stillness of that
little old house brought six years of nights into
ray mind, and I wondered how people ever re-
gretted their first youth, those intolerable uncer-
tainties and enthusicisms that stare at you from
the dead past like condemned gargoyles. The
incapability of youth goes on long enough. Heaven
knows, if not so long as the savagery of childish-
ness. In the daikness I could feel the soft ermine
of her cloak against me, and that faint dry scent
whose name I shall now never know. She was
very, very still, and I could not even hear her
breathing.

“ It is very kind of you to come with me," she
said suddenly, seriously. We were very still on
that landing, and I drew back my arm where it
touched her cloak. It was very soft, that cloak.
“ I have thought of you, and decided that if you
ever thought of me you had a right to think with
dislike. . . ." She was talking smoothly, calmly,
when suddenly her voice completely broke, into
little bits. “ Oh ! " she whispered. I was silent.
She said quickly : “ To me there's something

terribly indecent about humanity, all humanity.
It's as though, in the whole lovely universe,
humanity was cooped in this musty little house,
talking vaguely of dislike, eternally talking of
like and dislike, love and unlove, of doing and

134 THE GREEN HAT

undoings, purposeless yet striving and savage. The
other night I was motoring alone from Paris to
Calais, and it seemed to me that no law was strong
enough, no crime was big enough, not even dis-
loyalty, to stop us, when we had the chance of
rising above the beastly limitation of living as
we were born to live. Because we humans are
not bom to live, we are bom to die. ..."

“ Something has happened to you to-night," I
said. She was a faint white shape in the
darkness, and it seemed to me that that was as
much of her as 1 should ever see; and I was
right.

" No, nothing at all. Just a dream. But oh
failing the dream, how I would like a child ! "

" A dream-chQd ! "

" Ah, I’ve had those, a many ! No, a real one.
To be playmates with ..."

I said : " 1 will go up first to-night and see how
Gerald is. Will you wait here?"

“ Pm tired and frightened," she said faintly.
" Don t be long."

I don’t think I stayed up there more than a few
seconds. I don’t know. I switched out the light,
and as I went down the dark narrow stairs 1 did
not strike a match.

"Well?" she whispered from the darkness.

I don't know what I said. I suppose I must
have said that he was in the same state as when
she had seen him before. Then I pretended I had
no matches left, and said I had better go down
first whfie she held on to my shoulder. " Then if
you fall, Til fall," she complained, but I said I
would not fall.

Stair by stair we slowly descended in the dark-
ness. I wanted particularly to see Guy, There

APHRODITE

133

were certain things to be done, I supposed. My
mind was vacant as a plate on which was drawn a
confused picture that would, on looking closely,
mean something humble. Iheie had been a stain
on the wall, a great jagged dripping stain, and bits
of hairs sticking to it.

" Oh, God, this drink i " she said frantically ;
then almost sobbed ; " What's that ! " But it

was only the telephone bell from the hall down-
stairs, queerly strident and unrestrained in that
still, musty little house. Brrr ! Brrr ! Brrr ! . . .
“ I never knew a telephone could be so shrill !
Will it be someone for Gerald ? "

" It will ring fox r if I don't answer it/' I
said, opening the door into the lane. “ I'll follow
you to the car " I hope d it was Guy ringing up on
the chance of catching us.

"Well?" his cold murmur came through the
night He said he would meet me at my door in
ten minutes' time. " What are you doing about
Iris? " he asked me and I think 1 said : 0 Nothing.
What can 1 do?"

Iris was waiting by her car under the lamp.
The car was like a great yellow beast with shining
scales, and Iris, tali and gentle and white, the
lovely princess of the tale who has enslaved the
beast Far above them towered the pile of Sun-
derland House, enchanted almost into dignity by
the darkness. She looked at me gravely as I came,
she seemed to crouch like a tired fairy into her
white cloak. . . .

" You look very white," she said.

" Now, Lady Pynte ! " I made to mock her,
and I suppose we laughed. Then she was at the
wheel, sunk into the low seat, staring up at the
darkness of the faint London stars. “ I’m tired,"

THE GREEN HAT

136

she said again, and again I thought, what could 1
do? Then she did something to the dash-board
with her left hand, and the engine hummed. I
was on the curb, above her. Nearby a policeman
was flashing his lamp on a door. I supposed one
told the police. . . .

“Will you see Gerald in the morning ?” the
slightly husky voice just reached me. “ And tell
him to follow me to Paris? I shall be at number
— Avenue du Bois for a week or so, and then . . .
Good-bye/* she said sharply, as though impatient
with herself. “ Good-bye, dear. You've been
very kind — to the twin Marches. Good-bye . . .
perhaps for a long time. You have your work in
England, and I’m the slave of freedom. Good-
bye, my friend/'

I could not tell her just then. She lay aslant
in the driving seat, and her tawny curls flamed
in the light, and she looked sad and tired. I
could not tell her, and as she took her hand from
mine the great car leapt down the fat little slope
of East Chapel Street to the end, turned in a blaze
of light and colour, rushed up the parallel little
street to Curzon Street.

I was at the corner where I had last seen Gerald
putting his shoulder against the saloon-door of
The Leather Butler; and as Iris's car turned into
Curzon Street a two-seater passed me swiftly,
going the same way. I thought I heard a cry of
“ Iris ! ” above the rustle of the two engines, and
I thought I heard Iris's surprised voice, and the
rear-lights of the two cars seemed to draw to-
gether, but I was not sure.

I crossed towards Queen Street, sure only that
I wished to see Guy. From Jolley's corner I saw,
far up, two red rear-lights twisting into South

APHRODITE

137

Audley Street, and then, from afar, came the
scream of a Klaxon, the growl of a horn. I won-
dered who was in the two-seater, but at that
moment the tall figure of Guy came towards me
from my door, where a taxi had just dropped him.
“ Sorry/' he murmured. “ Poor young devil.
Only hope the other side won't disappoint him as
much."

“ I couldn't tell her," I said.

Guy smoked thoughtfully, looking over my
head. "I'll tell her," he said, “ in the morning.
Had an idea he might blow his brains out." ^

G»H.

K

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dark Letter

i

N a bitter afternoon in the last week of
January of the year 1923 the writer
found himself in the Place Vendome in
Paris.

Now here, in the Place Vendome, is
material ready to the hand of the as yet un-
disc overed chronicler of lofty frivolities : such,
unfortunately, as am not I. But I can, at least,
count up to fifty. There were forty-eight motor-
cars m the Place Vendome, and one coach-and-six.

The Place Vendome is a paradox in grey stone.
Spacious, noble, monumental, it is cast, even at
the stranger's first glance, in an everlasting mould.
The Place Vendome is, without a doubt, one among
the few things about which we may say with cer-
tainty : " That will last.” And yet, monumental
and everlasting though it is, what do we find in the
Place Venddme ? Do we find therein the practice
of the seven arts, the learning of the nine human-
ities, the study of any one among the august array
of sciences, nay, the application of any one among
the Ten Commandments? We do not. We find
forty-eight motor-cars and one coach-and-six. We
find that it is given over only to the frivolities
of the trivial of two worlds and to every sort
of "high-minded depravity” that may occur to

THE DARK LETTER

*39

the enfeebled wits of the exquisite. We find, in
other words, that the Place Vendome is the centre
of that floating population of a few thousand
dressing-cases, sables and Cachets Faivre of which,
under the lofty title of V aristocracie Internationale ,
the Chevalier Giuiio di Risotto is the ultimate
servitor. The Place Venddme is, therefore, no
place for a plain man, nor by any means a safe
station for the man in the street : there are motor-
cars kept in readiness to run them over.

Across the Place, from the rue de la Paix to the
rue de Castiglione, dash for ever the nimble green
Citroen taxi-cabs ; whilst from the rue de Castig-
lione to the iue de la Paix will march the Renaults
de luxe with scarlet wheels, passing in a fancy of
cool brown eyes and the poudre a la marie hale of
Bourbon days. Here and there among them,
maybe, will flash the racing Bugattis of the dark
young men a giggolo , a rastaqouire , a “ racing-man.”
They will come to no good.

And always the great column on which Napoleon
stands rises to the clouds, but no one cares about
that. All they care about are the forty-eight
automobiles and one coach-and-six which stretch,
in ordered array of two lines, from the foot of his
column to the entrance of the Ritz. The shops
are loaded with diamonds as large as carnations
and with carnations as expensive as diamonds.
The shop-keepers are very polite, and courteously
do not mind how many you buy. Americans buy.
Englishmen watch the Ameiicans buying. Grand
Dukes wait for the Englishmen to dare them to
have a cocktail. A few Frenchmen are stationed
at those strategic points where they can best be
rude to the English and Americans. Then the
English and Americans tip them. The women

140 THE GREEN HAT

do not wear stays, and insist on their men shaving
twice a day.

“ Well, at last ! ” sighed my sister, as her car,
colourless with dust, was added to the forty-eight.
I had been in Europe for four months, had lately
joined some friends at Cannes, had chanced on
my sister there, and had motored back with her
to Paris. We were foul with dust, numbed with
cold, aching with tiredness, and this was because
we had “done” the six hundred odd miles from
Cannes in two days and a few hours. The devil
was in it if there was any reason why we should
not have taken three days, or four, or five. But,
then, why do people say “'phone” for “tele-
phone?” Thus, they get an illusion of speed.

We went into the hotel. The long, narrow,
crimson lounge was crowded with tea-drinkers.
“ But what a crowd of women I ” said my sister.
But there were quite a few people in men's clothes.
A u Reception.

“ I-want-a-room-and-bathroorn-please,” my sister
said.

“ Madame?** The dark-suited gentlemen of the
Reception looked up from their desks at my sister,
saw that her clothes were not bad and that she was
in a hxupry, and looked away again.

My sister repeated herself, in that dead and
faintly aggressive tone in which women ask for
what is very probably going to be denied them.
“ I wired,” she added. Liar.

I went towards the concierge's box. He was a
nice man, and had a white imperial.

“ Is Mrs. Storm staying in the hotel?”

“ Sir?”

“ Could you tell me if Mrs. Storm is ”

“ No, sir, no, sir. Not at present, sir.”

THE DARK LETTER 141

“ I thought that, as her car was outside. . . .
A yellow Hispano."

“ That is so, sir. Par fait entente VHispano

jaune

“ But Mrs. Storm, you say, is not in the
hotel? "

“ No, sir. Not at present, sir."

“ Then, perhaps you may know, she has sold or
lent her car to someone ? "

“ That is so, sir. Madame a prSti V Hispano.
Merci, monsieur ."

“ You couldn't possibly give me any idea of
Mrs. Storm's present address?"

“ Pardon, monsieur. . . . T imbre , monseigneur ?
De quinze centimes , un. Merci , monseigneur .
L’ automobile d huit heures moins quart ? Parfaite -
ment, monseigneur. ... I have no instructions,
sir. That was the gentleman to whom madame
has lent her motor. Le due de V alaucourt.”

“ Thank you. But Mrs. Storm, you say, is in
Paris?"

“ Sir ? Je suis sans instructions , monsieur.
Madame ?”

“ What is it, what is it ? " asked my sister.

“Nothing," I said. “Got a room? Good. I
am going to the Westminster, and I'll come at
half-past eight, shall I, and take you out to
dinner?"

“ Yes, but not here. It's so crowded with minor
royalties that you can't stand with your back to
anyone except the orchestra. Larue ? "

§he had no sooner turned towards the lift than
my name was cried in an agony of exultation. My
sister says that my face as I started round was a
face of fear.

“ Only the other day," cried Mr. Cherry-Marvel,

142

THE GREEN HAT

exercising, with incredible perfection of gesture, his
eyes, shoulders, hands, wrists, beautiful teeth,
tie-pin and handkerchief, " we were talking about
you. . . But it was ever one of Mr. Cherry-
Marvel's many social charms that, the instant he
saw you after an absence, he would make it his
business to give you the impression that people
had been interested in nothing else but you during
your absence. Not, of course, that he stopped
there ; he had other things to say, too. " Of
course what I really must tell you first of all, is that
Henri Daverelle, whom, of course, you know as
well as I do, was saying to me only the other day,
& propos of something which I am positive that you,
with your sort of mind, will appreciate at its full
value. ..."

Cherry-Marvel was an artist enslaved by his
art : he could not see you but he and you must
instantly fall under its dominion ; for it was an
art too perfectly modulated to admit of hurry, it
was an art too sensitive to admit of interruption.
Indeed, a wicked little gleam would flash across
his wicked old eyes if you so much as made to
interrupt him. Pitiless to himself, he was only the
less pitiless to you in so far as you were not him-
self ; and, should you be a boor and leave him
suddenly, you might hear the dry, clear voice dying
in the distance, but dying hard, rising and falling
to the fullest and most pregnant sense of each
period ; for his, you understand, was an art not
of selection but of detail, and must always and be
continually expending itself. . . .

“Ava Mainwaring, whom, of course, you know
as well as I do, was saying to me only the other
day, A propos of something which I am positive that
you, with your sort of mind. . .

THE DARK LETTER 143

Essentially an aristocrat, in person dainty, neat,
fastidious, Cherry-Marvel's art was essentially
democratic, for it abhorred all limitation and
exacted from him its complete display on every
occasion, whether lofty, literary, or plebeian, which
came before his relentlessly alert eyes ; and you
can hear, through the last sixty years of English
social history, the rise and fall of Cherry-Marvel's
voice, each word dropping on a stunned silence like
a long-polished jewel. Eager, exquisite, always
prepared, always with a handkerchief fluttering
between his breast-pocket and the comer of his
eye, you must imagine him against the tapestry of
wasted time, a figure of ancient, aesthetic dandysme ,
on immaculate lawns, in drawing-rooms, up and
down terraces of palazzos, in clubs and cabarets.
You might enter a spacious drawing-room in Rome,
a museum in Naples, a friend's villa in Capri, you
might stray from your boat in a South Sea lagoon
into the smoking-room of the hotel, you might steal
a moment from your companions to see the moon-
light on the Pyramid. ... Oh, you might be any-
where, and suddenly you would hear that voice,
rising and falling, relentless, ageless, enchanting
even lions to silence, with here and there a sudden,
profound drawl on one word, any word, " de-ar,"
and you would, fascinated, be compelled to face
him — there, with full pale lips drawn wide apart,
wicked blue eyes absorbed with cunning ecstasy in
your stunned attention, the while, infinite as fate,
he joined together the perfected pieces of his art
with the word “ whereupon," which lounged from
his tongue in a crescendo to a cry of sadic exaltation.
And while you laughed at some elaborately phrased
conceit, wondering how he had remembered the
order of the words so well, he would watch

THE GREEN HAT

144

the effect of his art with kind, cunning eyes,
one wrist suspended in the air, his handkerchief
fluttering towards the comer of his eye, in
consummate politeness to show how he, too,
by your laughter, was appreciating the full
flavour of his art ... “ whereupon Elsa,
who, by the way, had really a very amusing
experience in Venice last autumn, and one which
I am positive that you, with your sort of
mind . . .”

Now, if anyone could tell me where Iris was to
be found, Cherry-Marvel was that man. Cherry-
Marvel knew, of course, everybody, and he knew
everything about everybody . . . “ of course it's
absurd to suppose that Alice, with her intelligence,
which I am positive makes its full appeal to you
— it is absurd to suppose that Alice could for one
tnometU have thought that her husband, whom
of course you know as well as I do, would divorce
her for going to Brighton with Cubby Tyrell,
because, as I was pointing out to her sister only
the other day, for one thing no decent man, and I
am sure you will agree with me about this, would
care to let it be known that his wife had ever gone
to Brighton, and for another, and this, of course,
is a Biblical detail which I am sure that you will
grasp at once, Cubby Tyrell, who is a very intimate
friend of mine, has been allowed, in spite of having
been married twice, to remain a member of the
Celibates Club. . . .”

At this time I hadn't the remotest idea as to
where Iris was or how she did. I had not seen her
since the night of her brother's death; and had
been permitted to gather from Hilary that he
knew as little as I did of her whereabouts. Secret
she had always been in her absences, Hilary said.

THE DARK LETTER

145

or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively
in hiding.

She had, a few weeks after that terrible night,
written me one long letter : from some place near
Rome, from a draughty house, so she wrote, on a
hill of strangled olives. There was no address on
the notepaper, and this, she wrote, was because
she did not want me or anyone to write to her.
" Please/' she added to that.

Her letter was presumably in answer to two of
mine addressed to the care of Mrs. Oden of Mont-*
pellier Square, but she was at the pains to excuse it
on the ground that she and I were tied together —
" no, tied apart ! " — by a bond, the existence of
which I would never, never know. Well 1 It was,
you can see, a feverish, mysterious letter ; and
made how much more mysterious by that almost
illegible, pencilled scrawl ! There were whole sen-
tences on the first few pages which I could not make
out at all, which I made almost blind guesses at,
while at some I could not even contrive so much.

“ It is your fault, my friend. You paved the
road up which I raced m chase of the Blue Bird.
Yours was the appointed dark finger in the dark-
ness. May God forgive you, for I can't. I will
try, but I think I can't. There is a waterfall of
fire. . . /'

Sheets upon sheets of it, that letter is before me
now, and still I am unable to decipher whole sen-
tences from that maze of pencil-marks on the
thin Italian paper. There was one that stared at
me, shocked me, in the middle of the second page
— ‘ " I may hate you "—but I could not, do what
I would, make out the words above or below.

"... I am lonely beyond bearing, and afraid.
I am so afraid. I wonder, will you understand ?

THE GREEN HAT

146

But if I bore you take courage, for I will not bore
you again. You are my friend, and this is my
good-bye. Forgive me, dear, the arrogance of
calling you my friend. But I am so afraid. Et,
satyr bien-aimi , fat raison. . . .”

I could, you can understand, make neither
head nor tail of it. She might hate — me ! She
might, heaven knew, be indifferent to me, but
why, how, hate ? And satyr bien-aimd was all
very well, but it meant nothing.

On the later pages she seemed to have con-
trolled her hand a little, but her mind, if one might
judge, remained . . . well, was that, perhaps,
the effect on a mind of a draughty house on a
hill of strangled olives ? “ I am lonely, but I

have always been lonely since I was eighteen.
Yes, I can trace my loneliness since then. It is a
long time/'

This letter, you must remember, came only a
month after Gerald's death. She wrote of that
night, and here her haunted pencil was at its
most firm, if that is saying anything. " There I
stood in the old, old darkness — how old darkness
is, have you ever felt ? — while you were upstairs
in Gerald's room. And I listened, but I could
not hear you moving, so I imagined you to be
staring at Gerald from the door, as you and I did
that night a million years ago, when, do you re-
member, you suddenly, strangely from your heart,
made that defiant courtesy to my hand ? And,
do you know, I almost cried because of your kind-
ness to that poor, helpless sweet. Oh, Hilary has
told me about you, and you luring Gerald off to
a Home, but all in vain, my poor Gerald. And
then I heard you switch out the light, and down
you came, slowly, slowly, more silent than the

THE DARK LETTER

*47

darkness, and when you spoke your voice was as
old as the darkness. But you are very young
really, else you couldn't be so defiantly, so im-
periously, kind. And I remember wondering why
you said you had no matches left, for before you
went upstairs I had seen a box half-full in your
hand, but I said to myself : ' He has forgotten, and
he is wretched at his friend's weakness/ Ah, you
should have told me about Gerald there and then,
indeed you should ! But you did not, for my
unworthy comfort's sake. Dear, you have a fine
touch for the affections — but cruel, that is what
you were, cruel. You laid your foot down on the
soil of kindness, but where your foot fell there
leapt up a dandelion . . . and in the heart of the
dandelion a tiny little rose ; but what, my friend,
is one little rose surrounded to suffocation by a huge
dandelion ? ”

Well i Puzzle this way, puzzle that way, I
couldn't make a glimmer of sense out of that
passage. I was pleased, of course, that she seemed
to like me, but as to the rest. . . .

Guy, as he had told me he would, had been to
sec her early in the morning. He had — another
friend of childhood — overruled Mrs. Oden, saying
it would be better not to wake Iris and bring her
downstairs at that hour, for could there be a better
place than bed in which to receive bad news ?
Mrs. Oden knew him of old, he was Apollo Belvedere
to Mrs. Oden. She had been desperately upset
about his news, coming as it did on top of what
she had read about Gerald in that morning's paper.
Poor Mrs. Oden.

Iris was asleep — “ Oh, as no man can ever
know sleep ! " — when she awoke dimly to a tall
shape at the foot of the bed. ("As no man can

THE GREEN HAT

148

ever know sleep ! " That, too, puzzled one, as
well it might.) Dark it was, the curtains drawn,
44 and I remember them flapping peevishly because
the door behind the tall shape was ajar. And I,
scarcely awake, could think but of one thing, my
awakening mind was hugging, in pain and joy,
but one thin ft . . . and I called the shape at
the foot of the bed by a certain name, a name
which was not his name. He made no sign that
he had heard the name wliich was not his name,
and I am sure he instantly made himself forget it.
For, as you know, Guy would defend a secret not
only against the angels of God, but also against
himself. 4 Guy I ' I cried at last, and he seemed
to smile faintly, like the handsome absent-minded
god he is. 4 Yes, Guy/ he said. * Sickening, isn't
it?' Those high good looks of Guy's, that small
poised head — frozen, tireless Guy 1 But that
meaning he was very gentle with me. ..."

He had spoken for me, too, saying that I hadn't
told her of Gerald's death at the time because she
had looked so tired and sad. 44 Poor Iris," Guy
had said, 44 the men who don't know you very well
care very much for your comfort, but the three
young men who have known you best of all have
not cared enough." Guy had said that, and she
lying in bed, stunned, staring, while he sat holding
her hand, as he might be an elder brother and
she a hurt baby.

44 He knew, you see, that I loved Gerald, that
Gerald was a part of me, although Gerald had
spent ten years in pretending that he hated me.
Do you think, my friend, that I would have let
myself be crucified on Boy's death only for the
sake of Boy's cruel relations and friends ? Two
people Gerald worshipped in the world, but always

THE DARK LETTER

149

he would have sacrificed Iris to Boy, that was always
the way of Gerald's heart. Above all things in
this w orld I love the love that people have for each
other, the real, immense, unquestioning, devouring,
worshipful love that now and then I have seen in a
girl for a boy, that now and then I have seen in a
boy for a boy, that playmate love. It isn't of
this world, that playmate love, it's of a larger
world than ours, a better world, a world of dreams
which aren't illusions but the very pillars of a better
life. But in our world all dreams are illusions,
and that is why the angels have crows-feet round
their eyes, because they are peering to see why
all dreams in our world should be illusions.

“ But you can't, you see, get rid of the funny
love between twins like Gerald and me just by
the word ‘ hate.' Even Boy couldn't really upset
that. There was something peculiarly us about
Gerald and me, something of blood and bone
peculiarly us which nothing but death could destroy.
And so Mrs. Spirit was sent into Hyde Park that
the thing that was us might be for ever destroyed."

She had suddenly asked Guy, half-sitting on
the bed beside her, what it was in the world
he loved most, and he had said he was sorry
to admit that he loved his son more than all the
world. “ I could have killed him for jealousy,
just then I could, he who had everything to have
also that. You don't know the body-ache for a
child, the ache that destroys a body . . . the
lament for a child of love, a child of lovers. . . .

" He would be two and a half years old now, my
son. Hector, you see, didn't know anything about
his son, because he left me in a temper before even I
was certain. And naturally when I was certain
1 wasn't going to be outdone in silliness by my

THE GREEN HAT

150

own husband, and besides, I thought it would be
mean to force him to come back if he didn't really
want to come back, and so I didn't let him know
For men, I would have you know, might make
an awful row and stamp away in a tearing jealous
fit, and when they are away they might be as
pleased as anything to have got away. You can
never tell about men, especially when they are con-
vinced that they are being genuine. But, of course,
I knew he would rush back quickly enough when
the baby came. Oh, 1 would see to that 1 And,
my dear, the fun I would have all by myself, for
Hector and I had always longed for a son, the fun
I had thinking of the look on his face when one
day he would get my ware in Ireland : * Arrival
of Hector-not-so-proud. You come too.' Can
you imagine what he'd look like then, and he stern
and handsome and all covered with V.C.'s and
oddments, wasting his time chasing disgusting
Sinn Feiners who wouldn't know a country of
their own if they saw it. I had that wire all
nicely written-out months beforehand, and I went
and hid ray ugliness in my old nurse's home
near Peterboro’ and stuck the wire with a pin
over my bed, being superstitious, you see, and
wanting a winner for once in a way. Well, and
then — Oh, and then they killed Hector just in
time, and when Hector-not-so-proud came along
he thought, the poor sweet, that the proper way
for a gentleman to arrive in the world was toes
first to slow music, and so away he had to go
again. . . .

" I have done with England, and England has
done with me. But I don't think I shall be able
to go and have tea with the Empress of China
yet awhile, for just now I love England as I never

THE DARK LETTER 151

before have loved it. The captains and the kings
of England — clean eyes, long shadows, low voices
, . . why, I must hover, held in running as in a
nightmare. And from the distance, from these
lands of loud shrill voices, I will hear the low, low
voices that I had long since thought I had given
up regretting. Indeed, I was quite sure I had given
up regretting them. But I am regretting them now,
like a baby. Good-bye, dear, and God bless you.
And when you think of me think instead of your
words * He has, with you/ and you will have the
sum of my pride in being liked by you/'

Often, during these past eight or nine months,
that scrawled writing would pass my mind, but as
I could hit on no clue to her fantasies, and as I
might never see her again, I had put Iris
carefully away into that part of our minds wherein
we keep fancies, images, regrets, the things that
we will do one day, the things that we would
like to do one day, the things that we will never
do again . . . when, but a moment ago, the
great yellow car had leapt from the Place Vendome
into the first place in my mind, and I would like,
I thought, to learn from my friend Cherry-Marvel
anything that might be learnt about Iris. But as
I listened to him, the way he had said this and
had done that and had heard the other, I won-
dered how I would ever get the chance to suggest
so much as her name to him. . . . & propos of
something which I am positive that you, with
your sort of mind. . . /*

We stood, for we had not yet had time to sit
down, in the little reading-room of the Ritz that
leads from the entrance-doors, while stern-faced
Americans turned over the pages of The New York
Herald on the long marble-topped table in the

152

THE GREEN HAT

centre, and a woman or two sat here and there
absorbed in waiting, and the dowager Lady Tekkle-
ham's voice nearby was grimly suggesting to the
Baron de Bel us that he could not do better than
let her drive him in her coach-and-six to dinner at
her villa at Saint Germain-en-Laye.

Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey
and my heavy coat, and weighed down, too, by the
gloom of the early winter evening that was falling
about us, so that my eyes, borne down by Cherry-
Marvel's amenities, could scarcely make out the
chairs and flowers and vases m the long courtyard
through the windows ; and suddenly I fell to
wondering how it had come about that Iris, who
loved her proud swift car, had lent it to a friend,
but the instant I mentioned her name Cherry'
Marvel's little eyes gleamed with fury at the inter-
ruption. I was abashed, yet I would txy again,
but . . . " whereupon Auguste de Maupin, whom,
of course, you know as well as I do . . ."

But at last I achieved the impossible, in inserting
a wedge into the fabulous monologue, and then I
murmured ! " 111 ? But are you sure, Cherry ?

Mrs. Storm is ill ? "

But illness appalled Cherry-Marvel, from illness
he could not help but turn away the neat, lined
mask of his face, from illness his Florentine dandysme
trembled away in the only unaristocratic emotion
I have ever observed in Cherry-Marvel, the emo-
tion of fear. “ Quiet we call Silence, the merest
word of all ! " For, appalled by illness though
he might be, his art could always rise to a general
view. ... He had heard in a roundabout way
that Iris had had a “ sort of minor operation "

“ But," I said

“ Whereupon," said Cherry-Marvel, his little

THE DARK LETTER 153

eyes gleaming for a second with fury, “ what I
said was, ‘ Operations, where are thy stings ? ' for,
as of course you know as well as I do, women are
scarcely women without them, and I have not the
faintest doubt that in Lesbos they suffered, if I
may put it like this, from the impolite insistence
of their womanhood even more than if there had
been any men there, for as I was saying to Marc
only the other day, 4 propos of the particular
shade in which she had dyed her hair, men may
come and men may go, but the moon, my dear boy,
is always there. Now here, for instance, is Iris,
quite one of the loveliest women I have ever seen,
and one who, I am convinced, must be very fond of
you with your sort of mind, here she has, I hear on
the very best authority, fallen a victim to one of
those mental derangements which seem, if I may put
it like this, to be an irresistible incitement to
polite surgery in quite another and more individual
part of the person. But what I have always said
about Iris is this, that I admire her so, and I am
so positive that you also must, with your sort of
mind, because she is one of the very few English-
women I have ever met who can, as I am sure you
will agree with me, live abroad without becoming
more and more English. . .

G.H.

L

i54

THE GREEN HAT

2

Paris rises in a cloud of chill darkness, the rain
falls like whips of ice, the street-lamps loiter on
vague, bitter errands, confused strings of light,
a stealthy, idiot wind glories in being corrupted
by comers. The platforms of th«. omnibuses are
packed tight with small men whose overcoats are
too short for them, the brims of their felt-hats
too narrow, their trousers turned up too high,
their eyes too dark, their face too pale. The jargon
of the traffic on the rue ue Rivoli, as it squabbles
for every step between the deserted pavement
beneath the railings of the Tuileries and the
reeking pavement under the long archway lit by
impudent shop-lights falling on imitation jewellery,
is multiplied an hundred-fold by the shrewish air
into a noise that hurtb like warm water on a
chill hand.

The taxi, a clever little Citroen taxi, darted
hither and thither among the squabbling hosts,
and nimbly we capered across the dark face of
the Louvre, nimbly over the Pont Royal and the
river paved with broken darkness, and so down
the slope into the rout of the Boulevard Raspail.

Maybe it is true that there are times when we
can detest Paris more deeply than any other city.
Other cities stare back calmly at our sudden
hatreds, other cities grow more impersonal as we
execrate them, while as for Paris, she is always
personal, but when we are nervous and detest her
for being Paris she becomes even more herself,
she insists on being herself with a nerve-racking
insistence, like a silly woman who, seeing she is
getting on her man's nerves, gives a loud, nervous

THE DARK LETTER 155

laugh and simpers : “ I can't help it, it's my

nature to be like this. . .

Now why were the people yelling here, what
was the matter? Millions of them there were,
joined in some strife between the Bon March 6 , the
Hotel Lutetia and the entrance of the Nord-Sud
railway, while omnibuses and trams made strategic
movements against each other, while facteurs in
dirty blue, fabulously moustachioed, pushed carts
about in all directions, irritating anyone they
could, and a motionless gendarme or two played
with his Mton, heedless, unheeded. The eager
face of a young artist I knew, shadowed by a great
black hat, artistic, anarchistic, strode out of the
white mass of the Hdtel Lutetia and turned greedily
towards Montparnasse. At last my clever little
Citroen and I plunged into quieter wastes, lit
here and there by the bastard glitter of a Cinema
Theatre falling on posters livid with three colours,
red, blue, and yellow.

That strange unstormy exquisite, Cherry-Marvel !
That most aesthetic creator of a monster more
terrible than Frankenstein's, for it devoured
the spirit of all who passed beside it ! Why I
should be worried about Iris I could not tell, in-
deed I was too tired to inquire, but worried I was
despite Cherry-Marvel's so well-informed badinage
about the white woman's burden, and the more
worried too, as the taxi plunged into nameless
darknesses beyond the Bal Bullier, towards the
address of the nursing-home which Cherry-Marvel,
that confidant at third-hand, had of course
known.

Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the
east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris,
silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris : silent but for a

THE GREEN HAT

156

rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the
devil it was now, as though because the prickly
warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn.
Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet
scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of
great tenement -houses. Ah, Paris, that we should
have come to this, you and I ! Paris, that we
should have come together down to this ! In how
many moods you and I have passed the time of
day and night together, we have sat in strange
places and dared the most devilish shadows, we
have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning
grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois
and up the Mont Val6rien, we have laughed at
painted boys and been reviled by painted women,
we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and to-
gether we have been bored by the unmentionable
and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright
and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while
Mio Mi Marianne danced a minuet du caeur with a
crimson garter and the moon fell across the french-
windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft
shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should
now have come down to this, lost together in these
nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness
of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than
ours. . . .

And now we tore up a dark, endless boulevard,
even as a shifty maggot in a pit of darkness. But
surely this was the murderer's Paris, here lived the
fathers and grandfathers of Apaches, here were
born the daughters of the drinkers of blood and the
sons of the mothers of crime. It stretched never-
ending between lamps fixed at astronomical dis-
tances, and on each side tall naked trees thrashed
the shadows of very high black walls. They hid

THE DARK LETTER

157

from the world, the people of this boulevard of the
high walls, and who shall say that they had no
reason to hide? And then, do you know, a lion
leapt out of the night, a huge lion that was black
as sin and crouched for prey in the centre way
between five lanes of darkness made even darker
by confused strings of light. And as we breathed
a prayer in thanks for our deliverance from the
lion of darkness trams crawled near us and stayed
a while, and tram, at the impulse of a vice peculiarly
continental, was joined to tram and crawled away ;
while we, having regained our breath, came beneath
the shadow of a terrible wall. It was the wall of
a castle, a fortress, a something satanically majestic.
This, I thought, is another of Carlyle's mistakes,
this is no less than the Bastille skulking in these
parts until such time as the Cam clots du Roy shall
have left the kindergarten and can crown the due
d’Orleans King of France. Far above our laboured
passage glowed a long, long row of small windows
faintly lit, and it seemed to me that they were striped
with bars of iron. And there was a great gate of
iron, and a black soldier with a beastly bayonet to
his rifle, and an old woman with a great brown
parcel under her arm, waiting. The clever little
Citroen stopped. It is tired, I thought, and will
go on later. . . .

“ Eh, numSro quarante-neuf, Boulevard Pierre
Abel ?* 9 the taxi-driver threw at me reproachfully,
and I got out, and I stared up at the great fortress
which towered above me like a beast with a row of
unclean eyes about his forehead, and the rain
whipped my face.

“ frest une prison ? 99

“ Mats out, monsieur. Le Paradis .”

The pavement was broad, of mud and asphalt

THE GREEN HAT

158

The prison towered on our right, filling the sky
with darkness — but for those distant, terrible
windows. The rain whipped down, stinging like
little animals. Nearby one foilorn lamp lit the
putrefying colours of the advertisements circling
a lavabo. What, I wondered and wondered,
could Iris be doing here? Facing me across the
broad pavement of mud and asphalt was a great
gate which had once been brown, lit by a lamp
on which had once been inscribed the number of
the Nursing Home. Iris was here. Were we, then,
always to meet in darkness, Iris and I? She was
here, and perhaps, I thought, on the other side of
her is a Morgue or an Asylum.

A yard or so from the great door there was let
into the high wall a small door inscribed Concierge .
I was startled at the clatter made by the bell. A
nun stood in the dim doorway.

CHAPTER SIX

The Red Lights

i

HE sfnpe of her coif against the dim
light was like some legendary thing's
head, and she was eating. I heard her.
That she was old and very stout was
all I could see. I could smell just a
little, too. Poor Iris.

I asked if I might have news of Mrs. Storm.

“ Ah, la dame anglaise /” She ate, but not
finally. “ Madame est assez bien, je crois . Mats
pardon , monsieur. Je nat pas d’ instructions b vous
donner

But I" I pleaded. ‘ But "

“ Je regrdte , monsieur. C'est pas ma faute, vous
savez . Pardon ”

She was closing the door ! Terse as you like. I
was helpless. " Madame est assez bien , je crois !”
Dear Heaven, but didn’t one know those assez
biens ! Isn't there a company in Heaven wholly
recruited from those who have been assez bien ,
and daily augmented by those who are assez bien !

I lifted up my voice.

" Pardon , monsieur

1 lifted up my voice in vain. So I was active.
She stared at me, panting. I withdrew my first
impression as to her being a nun. She was no nun.
She had a crucifix and a coif, but she was no nun,

r6o THE GREEN HAT

She was a woman scorned. She said many things
and used many words which I did not understand.
But I didn't care. I somehow thought, you know,
of Iris dying.

" I am here," I said in effect, " and here I stay
until I can speak to a doctor or a matron. I am
sorry, but you have made me anxious as to the
lady's health."

“ Mais je vous Vai ddja dit t jeune homtne t
Madame est assez bien l"

The ordinary dingy concierge's lodge : a black
stove, a table covered with frayed red cloth, a
chair, a stool, an indescribable odour, a plate of
food on the table — bceuf bouilli , which is French
for the salvaging of grey matter from liquid dun-
geons of onions, carrots and potatoes. I sat on the
stool. It was unbelievable that her coif had ever
been white. Somehow my eyes were transfixed
by the small wooden crucifix which, like a dinghy
on a choppy sea, rolled on her bosom as she ate. I
wondered how long I would have to wait. I won-
dered if I could smoke. I wondered if this was one
of those convent-nursing-homes. I wondered if
one called a mm madame or mademoiselle . They
were maidens presumably, so I supposed mademoi-
selle.

“ On pent fumer , mademoiselle?"

I was wrong. She looked at me with contempt.

C'est difendu , monsieur "

" Merci, madame."

I wondered if she really could be a nun. I won-
dered if one could tip a nun. Out of sheer hatred
one acquires a passion for tipping in France and
Italy. Detestable it was on this detestable day
to sit like this, being hated. I made a muttering
noise and gave her a ten-franc note, and it was in

THE RED LIGHTS

161

a more amiable spirit that she went on with her
salvaging. At last there were only two bits of
carrot and an awful looking onion left to engage
her attention, and I felt that one might perhaps
converse.

I was right about her being no nun. She was a
lay-sister, she said. And this place, she told me,
was a convent-nursing-home. “ Nous avons id ,”
she was pleased to add, “la clientele europienne la
plus chic”

Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day,
so far. Iris among a clientele europienne la plus
chic . . . . One saw the cosmopolitan divorcees,
their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty
little coquetries and the way they would blackmail
their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the
sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common
harlotries of England, France, America. My poor
ten-franc note must have seemed pathetic to
this old lay-sister, who probably thought nothing
of receiving a mille from an anxious Dago.

I had until then been trying not to wonder about
Iris in the vile shadow of a prison. Suddenly I was
furiously hot. What on earth was I doing here !
Intruding where 1 was not wanted I I was about
to go, to run, when the lay-sister was as though
distracted from the last piece of carrot by the
opening of a door in the back room. Frantically
she hurried towards it. It would look too silly
of me to run now. I could but ask, anyhow.

The lay-sister’s voice, voluble, vindictive, ex-
planatory. Much good my ten francs had done I
Then steps came towards me, into the lodge. “ Eh,”
I said. How afraid one always is of the callous
French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple
beards. . . .

i 62

THE GREEN HAT

A man, bald, sharp-featured as a bird, in a rough
brown great-coat, a tired-looking, an anxious-
looking middle-aged — Englishman !

“ Masters ! Conrad Masters 1 *

“ Well/' muttered that anxious-looking man.
He looked just the same when he was playing
bridge. He was always playing bridge, that man.
And he said he hated playing bridge. That kind
of man. “ Well ? How are you ? "

“ Glad," I said, “ glad it's no worse. Glad
it's only you. I was afraid of a purple
beard."

" And how did you get here?" A man given to
muttering, that. One could hear what be said or
not just as one pleased. One couldn't, you under-
stand, be afraid of Conrad Masters.

“ Masters, the fight I've had with this Cerberus
to see you I"

“ Rules . . . must have rules, you know. . . ."
A decidedly undecided man Soft-speaking but not
plausible, a combination peculiarly English. A
man of nerves. Shifty without suavity . . . and
then, suddenly, apt to bite your head off like a
very captain of men : " And how did you know
Mrs. Storm was ill ? Here ? "

” Oh," I said. “ Well. . . " And I thought
of many things. Of Conrad Masters, of " Should
a doctor tell ? " of Cherry-Marvel, that confidant
at third-hand, of Mrs. Conrad Masters. A dashing
lady, that.

“ Who but Cherry-Marvel told me 1 " said I.

“ God in Heaven, that man ! "

But Iris swept out of my mind her doctor's
problematical indiscretions to his dashing wife. . . .

“ 111," he muttered. “ Decidedly ill ... .

THE RED LIGHTS 163

" I heard/' I said desperately, “ that she'd
had a sort of operation "

“ There's been no operation ! " snapped that
captain of men. “ Simply maddens a man, the
way these things get about. ..."

“ Well, I'm only repeating what I heard, Mas-
ters. And you can't hope for secrecy once our
friend gets hold of anything — — "

“ Who said anything about secrecy ? " A
dangerous, feline muttering. “ I don't want
secrecy. ..."

Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm
with that lank man's doubtful heat.

“ I say. Masters, is she — is she very ill ? But,
if course, if I'm intruding. . . ."

Those worried eyes were fixed on the feet stuck
far out from the chair on which he lay as though
exhausted. The lay-sister appeared to be pot-
tering about in the next room. 0 Thinking of
Donna GuelSxa, are you ? Haven't much faith
in me and Martel-Bonnard, have you ? " Faintly
amused those worried eyes looked to be. That
was that man's way. You would think he was
being shifty with you when he might be just laugh-
ing at you.

Some would speak well, very well, of Dr. Mas-
ters; whilst others almost libellously, saying that,
working as he did with Eugene Martel-Bonnard,
the surgeon, he couldn't be over-scrupulous in
advising profitable but unnecessary operations.
Martel-Bonnard' s wife wore a famous pearl rope,
of which it was said that each pearl had been
bought at the price of a woman's life. But a
brilliant surgeon's life, Martel-Bonnard would say,
is full of drawbacks. He charged accordingly. I
think that he and Mrs. Masters must have bullied

THE GREEN HAT

164

Masters every now and then — not that he wouldn't
have looked worried in the Elysian Fields. Be-
tween them, those three Lad once made poor
Anna Estella Guel&ra very sorry she had ever
left Chile. She was quite well, Martel-Bonnard
said she was very ill, he almost killed her, then he
saved her, and how he hurt her ! " Naturally/*

smiled Martel-Bonnard. " Such things hurt. But,
my friend, she was — ^>ow//—but for me." How
one would have liked to operate on that sleek little
man, unsuccessfully I He despised you if you
differed from him, operated on you if you were
fool enough, and robbed you according to a special
system he had of discounting the exchange. One
hundred thousand francs, poor Anna Estella's
life had cost her that time. And pain, such as
falls only to the lot of women !

“ But, Masters, it's surely not as bad a case as
that I "

“ Mrn . . . not as bad ? Well . . . different
shall we say?"

“ But that was an internal operation I You
just said "

“ Quite. That's why it's different* . . /'

Talking with Conrad Masters was like playing
a game in which he who made out the most of the
other's words scored the most points. . . . But
Iris alone here, in this obscure place as full of
crucifixes as a cemetery !

“ I'm sorry," I said, rising from the stool. “ I'm
intruding. ..."

" You're all right," he mumbled. " So you
heard about it from that femme fatale , did you ?
Damn that man 1 Bla, bla, bla ! "

Those worried but faintly amused eyes were on
me. ” Been hearing quite a lot about you lately.

THE RED LIGHTS

165

Nurses would have your dossier complete by now
if they could understand English. You seem to
have put your foot in it somewhere. Rather sorry
for you if . . ."

This bantering . . . medical bantering ! Only
doctors dare do it. “ Well, how are we to-day ?*'
But by paying close attention to the game I had
scored one point. She was delirious. So far,
delirious. Then . . . " if I "

" Masters/' I said, " are you telling me that
she is dying? "

“ Mm . . ." he muttered impatiently, and as
he jumped up from his chair the rough brown
great-coat seemed to fill the dingy lodge. It smelt of
England, that coat. And, protruding from it, that
sharp, naked, weary face with the worried eyes. . . .

" Look here, Masters "

'* Here you are/’ he muttered. I could not
understand why he muttered “ Here you are"
until I found a cigarette in one hand and one of
those wretched spirit-lighters in the other. A man
without conviction even in his ability to strike a
match. . . .

“ Known her for years/' he muttered towards
his feet. " At Deauville that year . . . terrible
for her. Poor child. ..."

" Masters, you said Donna Guel&ra might die.
You know you did. But she didn't, did she?"

He looked at me sharply. “ If only she'd
help herself, lift a finger to help herself I That's
what beats a man. Doesn't lift one finger, she
doesn't."

“ Oh ! " I said, trying to look reasonable. But
I couldn't, for the life of me, accommodate myself
to the idea of Iris dying. “ 1 suppose this is the
crisis, is it. Masters?"

i66

THE GREEN HAT

The rough great-coat gave one vindictive flounce,
filled the room. “ Crisis ! The way you people
talk of crisis this and crisis that I Hear a word
once and stick to it through life ! * When does

the crisis pass ? ' There is no 1 crisis * in most of
these infernal things. Malaria, pneumonia, a few
others — yes, crisis, know where you are. But in
these things the patient just continues ill, two,
three, four weeks, might live, might not Lysis,
not crisis. Crisis ! "

" Sorry. Lysis. . .

“ Oh, here ! " He suddenly began fumbling in
an ancient pocket-book, from which he extracted
a small folded piece of paper. “ Might interest
you/' he muttered.

Scrawled in pencil across the slip of paper were
what looked like two names. That indecipherable
scrawl ! At last I made out the two names :
Hilary's and mine.

“ She said, should either of these two happen
somehow to hear 1 am ill and call, just be nice to
them, please. Her very words. ..."

“ Oh ! " I said. And I went on staring at the
slip of paper. It was a rather grubby slip of paper.
And those two scrawled names were like a faint
cry of loneliness.

“ Known her for years," Masters was muttering.
" Nice ! First tells me not to tell anyone, then
to be ' nice' to you two. . . ."

I gave him back the slip of paper. I don't know
why, and now I wish I hadn’t. I would like to
have it now, beside that fiver. " Nice, fivers are.

. . ." Thoughtful iris 1 She knew her friends,
she did. Lying lonely here . . . and having an
afterthought about Hilary — and me ! “ If they

should somehow happen to hear and call." Poor

THE RED LIGHTS

167

Guy hadn’t a mention. She wasn’t for putting
any strain on Guy’s lawfulness. But why lawful-
ness ? I looked at Conrad Masters.

" Septic poisoning/* said Masters. " That's the
trouble/'

That meant very little to me, for never was a
man so ill-informed about such things. “ But," I
said doubtfully to those gentle-womed eyes, and
he murmured :

“ Sure you’re not thinking of ptomaine poison-
ing ? Not that that isn’t quite enough to be going
on with. ..."

" Pain/' I said. “ Good Lord, pain. . . ." All
I could think of was pain, pain, pain. One
can almost feel the stabs of someone's pain.
Worst of all, one can mentally hear the faint
screams of a voice just recognisable. Conrad
Masters, the sight of him, reminded me vividly
of Anna Estelia’s pain. Once, from a waiting-
room, I had heard her screaming. " Pain ? " I
said.

" Oh, no . . . no." He weighed the matter.
" Nothing to speak of. Just keep still, that’s the
main thing. Very still, for weeks and weeks.
Long business, you know. But what worries a
man is that she doesn’t try to help herself at all.
Letting herself go . . . can’t tell whether con-
sciously or not, but somewhere inside her just not
caring. I've been sharp with her. . . . Nice
business for me, isn’t it? Good Lord, nice 1 If
only she’d take a pull, pull herself together . . .
someone just give her mind a jab somehow. No

f ood talking, of course. If she won’t, she won’t.

ies there, you know, just not caring. . . /' He
was drawing on a fur-lined glove, and it was to that
he spoke; almost, one thought, shyly. A curious,

i68

THE GREEN HAT

complex gentleman. " She's said once or twice
she'd like to see you and . . . well, learn you a
thing or two. Some stuff about roses and dande-
lions. You seem to have made a gaffe somewhere,
and it's quite on her mind to tell you about it
Hope I'm not giving anything away . . . but
might do her good just to see you, feel you're
round about. You can't tell. We'll see how she
is to-morrow. Extraordinary, I've found it, the
way a woman will wake up for a second from
days of delirium for no other purpose than to feel
lonely. ... Not awake now, though. Ill, this
evening. Can't really, you see, be iller if she tried.
It will be good news, really good news, if she is
alive in the morning. That's as much as I can
say. Sorry. . . . Well, I must snatch some
dinner. ..."

We were outside. The rain had ceased, it was
much warmer. The Masters's Renault, sleek and
shining black but for the scarlet wheels, dwarfed
my taxi.

Septic poisoning. I began to remember a little
about that. I remembered two words which
seemed very like “ septic poisoning" in reports of
trials of wretched women who had "operated."
Surely, Masters couldn't . . . she had, after all,
trusted me — “ be nice to him" — and I must at once
think the worst thing. Oh God, how foul a thing
a man's mind is, how foul ! But, Iris, dear Iris,
why is one able to think of these awful things
in connection with you !

“ There's always hope, you know," Masters was
muttering. “ Pity you kept your taxi I could
have dropped you. And Donna Guel&ra didn't
die, did she?"

But how Anna Estella had desired to live 1

THE RED LIGHTS 169

"Die, me!” she had later screamed with
laughter.

Iris had trusted me. " Be nice to him ” — her
very words. And I had thought that . . .

” Masters, you won't mind my coming round
again ? Perhaps to-night ? ”

" Sleep here, if you like,” he smiled. 0 I'll
be coming myself for a second, about midnight.
Wife's got a party. Like to come ? Rather good
bridge. Well, please yourself. . . /'

G.H.

M

170

THE GREEN HAT

2

I agreed with my sister that it was abominably
rude of her younger brother to be nearly an hour
late to take her out to dinner, especially as she
had been ready for at least twenty minutes. She
was furious. I said : " There is a new dance
place open. I heard about it from a friend of
mine, Mr. Cherry-Marvel. You will meet him,
he is charming. This new place is called La Plume
de Ma Tanie . It has only been open three nights,
so it will be very modish for another two. There
is a nightingale there/'

“ One cannot dance to a nightingale."

“ But why are you so exclusive?"

" It is cruel and beastly to keep a nightingale
caged."

“ Dear, it takes a woman who once had a pas-
sion for aigrettes and who loves eating lobsters to
be so sensitive. But there is probably baser music
to supplement this nightingale. There are, in
fact, five lovely niggers. The place is called La
Plume de Ma Tante so that English people may
know exactly where they stand."

" You are so funny to-night, but would you
mind not polishing your shoes on my dress? This
is a very terrible taxi, and 1 think men are mon-
strous. If you were taking any woman but your
sister out to dinner you would have chosen the
taxi with discretion."

" Rudolf and Raymonde are the dancers. I do
not want to go to The Pen of My Aunt, but for
your sake I would go anywhere. After dinner."

She was pleased, loving to dance. We walked up
the pavement of the rue Royale to the quiet

THE RED LIGHTS

171

doors of Larue. She said : " I love Rudolf and
Raymonde. I saw them dancing at Monte
Carlo, and they say American women give him

{ )latinum watches from Cartier and that he was a
ootman in San Francisco, or was that Rudolf
Valentino ? "

I said : " I say, do you know anything about
septic poisoning ?"

" Really, how callous you are ! Do I know

anything about it ! But I had it 1 "

" No !" One's sister !

" But of course I had it ! It is amazing when
one's own brother is quite unaware that one has
been through endless pain and torture."

" Not pain and torture," I said. " A little bird
told me."

" But 1 am not responsible for your feathered
friends ! I was as good as dead, that's all I
know."

" But, my dear, that was when you were having
a baby ! I was in Vienna."

" So you said. But, of course, it came on after
I had a baby. One does not get septic poisoning
for nothing. I nearly died, I can tell you."

" Vestiaire , monsieur ?”

"... Oh. I see. A baby. After that. . .

" I have ntver been so hungry in my life," my
sister said, " and you talk to me of septic poison-
ing. I suppose you think you will destroy my
appetite and therefore the bill will be less. I
will begin with caviare."

" Septic poisoning," I said, " did not kill you,
that is the point. You cannot imagine how glad
I am. Let us eat caviare."

172

THE GREEN HAT

3

La Plume de Ma Tante . Bright green walls
splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end,
whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other,
a naked woman. She was without hips, according
to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined
above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers
was a bowl of green malachite from which pink
water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her
feet. Many English people were present. They
would be going to the Riviera, then they would be
coming back from the Riviera. Colonel Duck was
there, with the quality. Colonel Duck was, no
doubt, just returned from some notably swift
exploits on the Cresta Run. But he never was so
talkative about his outdoor activities. Cherry-
Marvel was there, with a great big woman and a
nice-looking boy with the hands of a housemaid
who was a famous boxer. There was the usual
group of Argentines, very well dressed indeed.
They talked about le polo. All over the room
elderly women were dancing with young men of
both sexes. Mio Mi Marianne was there, sitting
alone, but I might not speak with her because I was
with my sister. A demi-mondaine will feel insulted
if you speak with her when you are with your sister.
Two years before Mio Mi Marianne had one night
tied a silk handkerchief round her wrist, and it
became the fashion for women to tie silk handker-
chiefs round their wrists. Then Mio Mi Marianne
tied a silk handkerchief round her throat, and
that became the fashion. She thought of these
things while smoking opium. She sat alone, staring
into a glass of Vichy Water. A young American

THE RED LIGHTS

173

polo-player called Blister went up to her table,
and maybe he asked her to dance, but she just
looked at him and he went away again. Her eyes
were intent on an opium-dream, and she was very
happy in the arms of the infinite. Mio Mi Marianne
will be found one day lying on the Aubusson carpet
of her drawing-room. There will be a hole in the
carpet where her cigarette has died out.

A blackamoor beat a warning roll on his drum,
the dancers left the floor, the lights dwindled and
awoke again in swaying shadows of blue and car-
mine. A heavily-built young man with the face of
a murderer danced a tango with a lovely young
girl with short golden curls. Then he threw her
on the floor, and picked her up again. Rudolf and
Raymonde. He did it beautifully. An American
woman called the Duchess of Malvern threw
Rudolph a pink carnation. The Baron de Belus
said harshly : " That is a white carnation really,
but it is blushing at the fuss that women make of
Dagoes.” In a cage clamped to the bright green
wall near us was a dumb nightingale. It kept
pecking at the floor of its cage, looking at nothing
and nobody. I left my sister in Cherry-Marvers
care. I said to her that he could dance, and next
day she was furious.

m

THE GREEN HAT

4

The burning eyes of the Renault made the grim
Boulevard Pierre Abel almost hospitable. That
was a conscientious man, Conrad Masters. How
glad T was of him at that moment I What had he
said about iris ? something about his having known
her for years, something about “ that year at
Deauville . . . terrible for her/* That would
mean, then, that Masters had been there during
the Boy Fenwick tragedy. Iris, poor Iris ! Such
punishments ... for what crimes ? What crimes
deserved such punishments? Iris, poor Iris 1 But
she wouldn't mind dying, not she. That was the
trouble. Masters had said. But no doubt she knew
best. . . .

The Paradis prison was a pit of blackness in the
night. The dim lights behind the iron-barred
windows were out, and it was impossible not to
wonder if they slept up there in their iron cages,
the wicked, the foolish, the betrayed. Perhaps the
nightingale in its cage did not care. Perhaps

those up there did not care, and slept like angels.
But the wrongly accused would not sleep, that
was certain. Does innocence wrongly-accused
profit anyone except a very wise man or a very
good man, except a man who cares nothing for the
opinion of this world or one who cares only for

the love of the next ? I said to the taxi-driver :

“ Hell can know no torment like the agony of an
innocent in a cage/' and when he had carefully
examined his tip he agreed with me.

Gently as I could, I rang the bell, praying

that the old woman would not be angry with
me-

THE RED LIGHTS

*75

“Aha!” she chuckled. “Aha! Monsieur ~
toujours-dc-V audace t Mats entrez , monsieur ,
entrez ! The doctor is just this moment arrived.
Truly he is a good man, this Dr. Mastaixe — but
our French doctors, you should see 1 They come
for a moment, they go, and she lives or she dies,
what do they care as long as they are paid ? But
tills English doctor, he does not know how to
make money easily. Madame his wife was this
moment telephoning that he should go home
quickly, for they are awaiting him for le bridge .
Ah, cet bridge , bridge, bridge !*'

“ But you see how anxious I am ! Have you
heard anything since I last saw you?"

“ To have heard nothing, young man, is to
have heard good news. But sit down, the doctor

himself will tell you in one moment ” That

demoniac bell ! It clanged through the place.
Perhaps of all the nations in the world the French
alone are capable of fixing the loudest possible
bell to a nursing-home. The fat old woman grinned
vindictively at me. We had been enemies, now
we were allies against the intruder. “ Bah ! ” she
said, and opened the door. From where I stood I
could not see who was without, but I could hear a
voice : low, hesitating, in very correct French, in
Foreign Office French. . . .

" Napier ! 99

We stared at each other in the most profound
surprise and confusion. Napier, favourite of the
gods, shy, sensitive, fine . . . just here, just
now, facing me in the obscure silence of the Paris
night !

“This is funny/' Napier made to smile. “What?”

Napier Harpenden and I had known each other
well, as “ well” goes, for years, but never before

THE GREEN HAT

176

had we been alone together. But once, some years
ago, I had seen him in a curious moment. Late
one night I was walking down a villainous alley
near the East India Docks when through a lighted
window I was astonished to see Napier's white,
thin, fine face and those dark fevered eyes. He
was talking earnestly to an old man and a very
pretty young girl who was crying, and I felt ashamed
to have seen him, for that is how Napier affected
one, you were hurt at the idea of hurting him.
I had wondered often what he could have been
doing there, what secret good work he was at.
He was a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite
of the gods who never once relied on the favouritism
of gods or men. . . .

He still stood outside, a serious slack shape in
a tweed overcoat. He masked, behind that faint,
deprecating smile of his, more than the mere con-
fusion of surprise. He would very much rather
it had not been me he had met just there. Napier
and I were friends only because all our friends
were mutual. We hadn’t ever found, tried to
find, any common ground for friendship. Sincerely,
I was very sorry to be there. Napier had that
effect on one.

“ Venice is waiting in the taxi,” he said. When-
ever Napier and I met he would instantly speak
of Venice. This was to show me that he knew
Venice and I were great friends and that, if he
and I weren’t great friends, that must somehow
be his fault. How could you help liking a man
like that? The courtesy of that favourite of the
gods went so much deeper than anyone else’s :
let it one day go a little deeper, and you felt that
it might have gone a little too deep, down, down
to self-destruction.

THE RED LIGHTS

177

I said I had arrived in Paris only that afternoon,
and had heard, by chance, that Mrs. Storm was
ill. My presence there seemed, you can see, to
require a more definite explanation than any he
might think fit to give me. One felt, with Napier,
uncomfortably familiar to be asking after Iris in
this obscure place at this late hour. He and Iris
had been " kids/' Then I thought, comically, of
the two scrawled names on the grubby slip of
paper. Well, I seemed to have rights too. More
rights than Napier, really. Conrad Masters had
no instructions to be nice to Napier. Poor
Napier. . . .

" But/' he said, slowly, slowly, " surely she's
better by now? I only just called on the off-
chance . . . really wanted air after the train
journey more than anything else. Surely . . .
what ? "

I stared at him. What to say? You see, the
sudden, white way he was staring at me made me
feel terribly canny of anything I might say. Be-
sides, one treated Napier differently .

"Better?" I repeated. "Well. ..."

“ But, look here," he said, protested. ... It
was dark, there between the dim lodge and the
night. Why on earth didn't the man come in?
“ Venice and I are going south to-morrow, and I
just thought I'd inquire — but, look here, I never
dreamt that she ..."

I at last grasped the fact that he had known
she was ill. He was the only one among us who
had known she was ill. One kid had known that
the other kid was ill . . . and had waited until,
on his way south, he could conveniently come
round and inquire. Well I

u You had better come in, hadn't you?" I said.

THE GREEN HAT

178

I simply couldn't say slap-out that iris was ill
nearly to death. You couldn't say things like
that to those dark, troubled eyes. You protected
Napier from your own impulses, always. A favourite
not of the gods alone. . . .

But he still stood there in the darkness, staring
at me very strangely and scowling in that funny,
attractive way he had. Whenever I think of
Napier I can see that Napier scowl and I can hear
that involuntary “what?" he would tack on to
questions.

“ Look here, something's the matter." His
voice trembled absurdly. ..." Something
serious. What ? ”

“She's very ill," I think I said.

“Very!" he snapped. “What? You mean
. . . really ill? What?”

“ I think so,” I said. “ Yes.”

I looked into the room, avoiding those eyes.
The lay-sister, a pair of horn spectacles on her
nose, and without a sign of interest in us, was
mending the heel of a black woollen stocking, one
end of which lay coiled in a black tin-box. I
couldn't somehow look at Napier just then. That,
you see, was the first hint I had of the thing, and
though it was no more than a hint, it tore at one.
The look in Napier's eyes, I mean. The man's
heart was in his eyes. . . .

“ Look here,” he said sharply, “ I don't under-
stand this. What? 1 mean, I'd no idea it
was ...”

“ I don't know anything,” I said, “ except just
that she's ill.” We stared at each other.

“ As ill,” I said, “ as can be.”

“ Oh,” he said. His eyes on me, not seeing me,
he pushed past me through the doorway. And

THE RED LIGHTS

x 79

when I saw his face again, I was appalled. It was
lost, abandoned, terribly unaware of everything
but fear, it was enchanted by fear. He simply
didn't care but about one thing. . . .

“ Haven't seen her," he said, and scowled at me.
Not that he had, at that moment, the faintest
idea who I was.

" Here, a cigarette," 1 said.

He stared at it in his fingers. He crushed
it. . . .

“ Haven't seen her for nearly a year," he said
in a rush, and stopped abruptly, seemed to realise
me, scowled. “ I say, what is it ? Pneumonia or
something ? What ? "

I fumbled. I wasn’t, I said, certain. Had only
seen the doctor for a moment. Something inside,
I thought, had gone wrong. . . .

I was immensely lost in all this. He had known
she was ill — but not seriously ill, nor of what 1 I
grabbed at one certain point of behaviour for
myself. One had to. I was, anyhow, going to
make no mischief. Like Guy, I would give no
" gratuitous information" of any sort. For better
or for worse, I wouldn't. News of septic poisoning
was obviously not for Napier, not for anyone —
except for the two names on the grubby slip of
paper. This septic poisoning seemed to mean
only one of two things, a child or not a child. That
was most utterly Iris's business. Iris the desirous
— for a child. “ To be playmates with." And I
wondered, just then, if it had been another Hector-
not-so-proud. “ Like to have a winner once.
..." I kept on hearing that slightly husky
voice saying little things.

“ What I mean to say is," Napier said, with
sudden astounding calm, “ that this is perfectly

180 THE GREEN HAT

idiotic. What? You see, I hadn’t the faintest
idea. ...”

But when, deceived by the calm of his voice, I
looked at him, I found it better to look away again
at the frowsty old lay-sister sewing away at her
stocking. It was mean to look at him, he was too
naked. I realised how masked we always are,
how this is a world of masked men, how we are
masked all day long, even on the most trivial
occasions. Then I felt his hands suddenly tight
around my arm. And tighter. Now what?

“ I’m awfully sorry,” I said idiotically.

“ Look here — I say, for God’s sake ! You see,
I don’t understand. What? She wrote to me
weeks ago that she was going to be just slightly
ill, and now ...”

The fingers dropped from my arm. “ Hell ! ” he
muttered. “Oh, hell! What?" He hadn’t the
faintest idea of what he was saying. I wished to
God he had, I didn’t want to listen to him, I
hated listening to him, it was like spying on the
man. Spying on Tristram wandering in the forest
raving with love for Yseult. But what could I
do? How leave him like this? How let him re-
turn to Venice like this? Good Lord, and Venice
waiting in the taxi ! If she saw him like this.

. . . Good Lord, was the man mad to have
brought Venice with him ! Here, to see Iris I
The misty impulses of a man of honour ... do
nothing behind his wife’s back. After, you know,
having done everything. But . . . Good Lord,
if Venice grew tired of waiting in the taxi and
came and found Napier like this, like a demented
knight in a story 1 Venice of the lion’s cub head,
the mischievous, loyal eyes, dear Venice 1 adoring
and adorable Venice ! Napier’s wife. . . .

THE RED LIGHTS

181

And, at that moment, I saw Venice again at the
Loyalty, that night ten months ago, happily wait-
ing for Napier, whose wife she would be in three
days. “ Darling, darling, darling ! ” That night
of Gerald’s death ! And then for the first time
I remembered the cry of “ Iris ! ” in the night,
and the two red rear-lights swerving into South
Audley Street, and I understood how it was that
Iris in her letter had called me her “ destroyer ”
. . . her “destroyer” with love, for no lover
could have passed her way that night had I told
her about Gerald. And Napier had passed her way,
Napier whom she had seen that night for the first
time in many years, Napier her ancient friend.
“ There were two roads leading from a certain
tree. . . .” And the two roads had come together
in the darkness of that night, in the darkness of
cruelly blind chance, and now they had come
together again in the darkness of this night, while
Venice waited outside. . . .

I couldn’t, you can see, not do anything just then.
I couldn’t let this love-lost man be found by Venice
in her husband’s shoes. Napier and Venice, the
happy lovers. ... I was on Venice’s side. For
Venice ! Always, I was for Venice. One likes so
few people, but one likes those few very, very much.
This love-lost man must be woken up, must be-
have. Of course he must behave ! Venice, for
Venice ! How dared he have done this to Venice ?
Marrying her on the third day from that
night. . . .

1 asked him where he was staying, and when he
said “ the Meurice,” I told him that if he would
go now I could ring him up when I had seen the
doctor. “ It’s no good waiting here,” I said. " I
know the doctor.”

182

THE GREEN HAT

He stared at me with the immense, the devas-
tating, dignity of the utterly careless. I bitterly
wanted to wake him up, to make him see the thing
he had done, the beastly thing. For Venice 1 “ It's
no good/* I said cruelly, “ keeping Venice waiting
for ever. ..."

He scowled at me, or at something just behind
my shoulder. *' I’m going to see Iris," he said.

It was quite definite, he was going to see Iris.
It would probably, I supposed, do Iris all the good
in the world to see Napier on this critical night.
Napier and Iris. It might make her care whether
she lived or died . . . but why shouldn’t she
die? Venice would condemn her to die. Iris was
the foe. Why shouldn’t she die? You can’t do
things like that, and not die. Stealing like a little
thief into the garden of Venice, and stealing away
like a little thief ... to bear Napier’s child,
unknown to Napier. . . .

" Hell ! " he muttered, I stared at him, at those
burning, broken eyes. . . .

" Hell I " he said. " Oh, God, what hell ! What ?
If you only knew. ..."

" I don’t want to know," I snapped. Well, did
one want to know? But he didn’t hear, didn’t
care, didn’t see. Being with him, you can see,
was exactly like eavesdropping. Why, if Venice
came in and saw this love-lost man . . . her
Napier, her darling, like this, with burning broken
eyes. But there are some things that can’t happen !
You couldn’t take Napier from Venice, And how
quickly, how poignantly, Venice, if she saw him
like this, would know the difference between his
easy, smiling love for her and this . . . damnable
madness.

But in the dark taxi she wouldn’t see his face,

THE RED LIGHTS

and I was just about to try again to get him away
when he said fiercely : " It's not as though I don't
know anything about it. Or do you think Iris is a
liar? What? "

" Napier, you really must pull yourself to-
gether "

“ No, but anyone would think I was a most
fearful cad. What?"

And he scowled, in that Napier way of his that
made one want to forgive him everything. “ I
mean, not coming before, seeing she's so ill . . .
waiting all this time, and coming just now. Why,
she wrote to me four weeks ago, saying she was
going to be just slightly ill and have a rest for a

week or two, so of course Oh, look here, here's

the letter, you 11 see for yourself "

" But I don't want to see for myself. Steady,
man ! I quite understand. Of course you couldn't
know. ..."

"No, but look here, you'll see. ..."

Feverishly he began fumbling in his inside-
pockets, pulling out papers, a pocket-book, pass-
ports. : . .

Venice could be very still. I imagined her in
the doorway, looking at Napier in this state. She
would be very still, and in her stillness she would
be destroyed. Venice was jealous, so jealous and
possessive. " Got to be with Napier," she had
pleaded to rne once. " You don't know what he's
thinking about half the time, and he doesn't know
what he's doing the other half."

Some of the papers dropped to the floor, and I
picked them up and thrust them into his gaping
pocket. The old nun smiled at me over her spec-
tacles, and then looked at Napier and tapped her
forehead. But you could see she liked the looks

THE GREEN HAT

184

of Napier. “ Quelle belle silhouette !” she grinned.
I don't believe that Napier to this day knows
there was anyone but our two selves in that
lodge.

He waved a white thing covered with scrawled
pencil-marks, and beside it I somehow saw that
letter from a draughty house on a hill of strangled
olives. But between the two came the vision of
Venice destroyed.

“ I don't want to read it, Napier. I quite under-
stand. What on earth does it matter whether you
knew or not, so long as you know now?”

" Thinks a lot of you," he said darkly. “ Told
me, last time I saw her. . . ."

He passed a hand over his mouth. I said :
" But ..."

“ Beastly," he said, looking at me with enormous,
dark surprise. " That's what I feel. Beastly. As
though my skin was a dirty shirt. Ever get that?
I mean, here she's dying, and I . . . God, how
one gets to know oneself ! What? But I'd like
you to see. I mean, since it’s you. She thinks a
lot of you, I know she does. Thinks you're nice.
Funny how she says that, 'nice.' What? But
what's she want to lie for ? Iris never lies. Never.
That's what beats me. I mean, why, to me?
What? Go on, you'll see. ..."

Crumpled the letter was, but he had, in a sort of
way, smoothed it out. I stared at it. I had to,
for he was watching me with those ruined, plead-
ing eyes. The greyhound unleashed. . . .

" She's dying." I heard his voice from miles
away. " You can't tell me I She's dying. . .

" She won't die," I said firmly, glad to look up
from the letter. And, you know, I was quite cer-
tain at that moment that she wouldn't die. The

THE RED LIGHTS

185

beloved of the favourite of the gods wouldn't die.
The favourites of the gods are not let off so easily.
Oh, she wouldn't die ! It would be too easy to
die. “ The Marches are never let off any-
thing. ..."

I stared at the crumpled-looking thing in my
hand. I didn't read it. The poor devil was only
showing me the thing because, at that lost moment,
he was starving for understanding, for anyone's
understanding, after these ten months of silence,
of Venice-Napier-Iris silence. . . .

I couldn't, merely from the wretched fact of
staring at the thing blankly, avoid the first few’
lines of that schoolgirl scrawl. “ Napier, I have
to go to a nursing-home for a few weeks' rest.
Napier, dear Napier ! I've tried not to write, you
know I have, just as we promised, but as we are
never to meet again I'd like you to pray "

That is all I read, and there I stood, staring at
that crumpled letter like an idiot. " As we are
never to meet again. . .

Figures moved, I could see them, hear them,
their cries, laughter, silences. Their silences.
Napier, Venice, Iris. They had come together,
blindly, desperately. By chance — but it is written
in vinegar that there is no such thing as chance.
And I, why, I had been appointed, a silly finger of
fate, to make "chance" more sure! They had
come together, those three, propelled to each
other from darkness for darkness's sake. The weak
to the weak, the strong in chains. Always that is
the way of things, and for no reason at all except
life's most damnable unfairness, which is for ever
saying : the weak shall be made weaker, the strong
shall be destroyed. Venice was strong, strong as
gold, in loyalty and love. Incorruptible, golden

G.H. N

i86

THE GREEN HAT

Venice ! Salute to Venice ! So, said the Prince of
Darkness, she must be destroyed, and to destroy
her in the most efficient and painful way Napier
must see Iris, unseen since girlhood, a grown-up
Napier must see a grown-up Iris, a youth curiously
sensible to the pitiful must suddenly see an Iris
wrapped in tragedy and scandal, a helpless, hope-
less, unhappy woman -the favourite of the gods
and the poor shameless, shameful lady ! And it
was arranged, the destruction of Venice, to begin
with a sudden, surprised cry of " Iris I ” in the
night, and then, behold ! two cars would sweep
through the silent streets into the heart of the dark
forest of London, even to Napier's small toy house
in Brompton Square. Oh, how clearly one could
see them, hear them, those friends of long ago.
Clear to see they were, fumbling with their lives
in the darkness of all life, most emphatically not
talking of love, most emphatically being old friends.
Clear to see, those two, Napier and Iris, the ancient
friends. Maybe, to make chance more sure and
flesh more weak, which is a jesting habit of the
fallen archangel's, they had been in love long
ago and had been unhappy and had parted. The
queer death of Boy Fenwick would have come
between a boy and girl love, and across the wide
gulf that separates a young man of consequence
from a lady of pleasure they would not have seen
each other for a long time. " There were two
roads leading from a certain tree." And one
might hear Napier that night, not this love-lost
thing, but the favourite of the gods, happy on
the wings of an ancient friendship, pulling at Iris's
arm to persuade her out of her car : " Iris, come
in for a moment. Oh, come along, Iris ! I know
how fond you are of a ni^. glass of cold water,

THE RED LIGHTS

187

and I have some of the most superior cold water
in London. What? And well never have an-
other chance to talk again. ..." And Iris,
Iris of the lament for a child ! Iris had lit a flame
and was like to be burnt to death in the coki fires
of that flame. Iris had lit a flame, and the flames
that Iris lit seemed quenchable only by death.
Boy and Iris, Hector and Iris. Napier and Iris.
But Napier could not die, favoured of the gods.
Iris could not die, " for the Marches are never let
off anything," and so it would be the younger
brother of Hector-not so- proud who must die,
who must have died, thoughtfully trying to tempt
his mother into the carelessness of death.

The lay-sister had gone into the other room,
which must have been a sort of kitchen, and
Napier had taken her chair. He sat there,
shadowed with whiteness, scowling into the black
tin-box.

" I see,” I said. "Of course. ..." I made
him take the letter back, and suddenly he looked
up at me intently. He'd find out something, he
would.

" She is dying, isn't she? You're certain your-
self, aren’t you? What?"

" The doctor should be in in a moment, and
you can ask him. No, I don't think she's dying.
My sister had the same sort of thing, and she's
dancing at the moment "

" Same sort of — what thing, then? What?"

A gaffe, a faux pas , a bloomer I He scowled up
at me, blackly intent. . . .

" Ptomaine poisoning," I said.

"Oh, God 1 " he said. "Oh, God 1 What?
Poison. ..."

He stared at the letter which I had put into his

1 88

THE GREEN HAT

hand. He turned it about, and seemed to think
profoundly. " You see," he muttered, " it’s all
wrong, this. All wrong. What?”

I wasn’t cast for a moralist. What I said,
very uncomfortably, was : “ Well. ...”

” All this messing about,” Napier scowled at
the letter. Then he looked at me, darkly, help-
lessly.

“ Get let in for things," he said.

" Difficult,” 1 said. “ I know ..."

"God, isn’t it 1 Difficult. . . . What? I
mean, when you want to be . . . well, when
you want to live clean. We promised, oh God,
yes ! not to write, never to meet. . . . Must
live clean, you see. What? There isn’t,
when you come to think of it, any other way to
live. ...”

" Guy says that. ...”

"Guy? Yes, but . . . need guts like Guy’s,
don’t you? What? Look here,” he suddenly
waved the letter at me, “ will you go out and keep
Venice company for a moment? I mean, see what
she's doing? And I'll see the doctor fellow and
make him let me see Iris for a moment. Promise
wiped out by approach of death. . . . What?
I mean, lonely for her here. . . . Told me, last
time I saw her that she was lonely. Hurts, lone-
liness. What ? And then I find her in this
hole. ...”

He thrust the letter into his gaping coat-pocket.
I could see it there, that pencilled scrawl. Letters,
letters, letters like radium-bombs, left lying about
for years, then bursting. What fools men were,
keeping letters . . . travelling about with them,
sticking them into their coat-pockets. Suppose
Venice saw that letter . . . just a few lines of it.

THE RED LIGHTS

189

Whether Iris lived or died . . . suppose Venice
saw just a few lines of that letter. For Venice. . . .

“ Napier," I said.

He stared at me, extraordinarily handsome at
that moment, and I remember thinking just then
of what is always said, that women are not very
attracted by good-looking men. But what is
always said must be wrong.

"I say," he said, “got a cigarette? What?"

" Napier," I said, “ give me that letter. ..."

" Or," I said, “ have two matches to your
cigarette. ..."

A tiny smile fluttered round the thin quivering
lips. “ There's no end to it," he whispered, “ is
there ? Once you begin. The nasty precau-
tions. . . . "

He struck a match, and the flame lit the ruin
in his dark, fevered eyes. “ You can't," he said,
“have anything cleaner than love. You can't.
This love, anyway. Clean . . . clean as the
Virgin Mary. And then . . . you're dogged by
dirt. You think fine things, fine sacrifices . . .
and you're dirty as all Sodom and Gommorah.
All this nastiness round a thing, all this messing
about. ..."

It was as the letter burnt in his hand and flut-
tered, just like a hurt, crow, to the floor, while he
watched it with intent seriousness, that I heard
a step by the door in the other room. To see Con-
rad Masters alone, I hurried towards it. There he
was, tired, worried-looking, his sharp features
sticking like a great bird's out of that rough brown
coat.

“ Bad," he muttered. “ Can't do more. She's
conscious, too. And doesn't give a damn. Not a
damn. I told her you were here, and she said

THE GREEN HAT

190

' Nice’ to that, but didn’t seem to think you were
worth living for. Need a miracle now. . . .
* Nice!’”

“ But, good God,” I said, " we’ve got a miracle
here ! He’s a bit mad, but miracle is his second
name. ...”

" And what's his first?” Masters snapped.

" Harpenden. ...”

“ First name, Christian name,” said Masters
wearily. "Napier, by any chance?”

" You’re right,” said Masters. A decidedly un-
decided man ? Why, he radiated resolution : and
a lean sort of mirth. “ Never know your luck,”
he said. " Not in this world. ...” I just man-
aged to catch him by the coat as he plunged
towards the other room, in which one could
make out the tail of Napier’s coat. " Masters,”
I whispered, " I went and told him it was
ptomaine poisoning. ...”

" Good,” said Masters. Those gentle worried
eyes with the faintly amused look. " That’s all
right,” he smiled. " Young ass.”

There sat Napier, a lost man. . . .

" Come along,” Masters jabbed at him. " Come
along, man ! Waive introduction. Life and
death. ...”

Napier jumped up. Masters looked almost fresh
and boyish beside him. A captain of men, that
was Conrad Masters.

" I say,” Napier said. . . .

" Look here,” said Masters, “ I’m taking you in
to cheer her up. Might make all the difference.
Just might. ...”

Napier tried to smile. Oh, he tried.

“ But, doctor," he said. " Is she . . . going?”

" She wants to go, that’s the trouble. Anyone

THE RED LIGHTS

191

would think/' snapped that captain of men, " that
I was committing a felony in trying to keep her
alive. By the way she looks at me. You've got
to cheer her up, Mr. eh ..."

“ Captain Harpenden," I said.

44 You've got to make her care whether she
lives or dies. That's your business, Captain Har-
penden. I'll give you five minutes to do it
m. , .

Napier looked from him to me. He scowled
immensely.

44 I'll go out to Venice," I said, but I don't
suppose that Napier, passing me, heard a word.
Conrad Masters stayed a second. Gone was the
captain of men. He looked terribly worried. . . .

44 I say, want to play bridge ? "

44 Bridge !" I said. 44 Bridge? Bridge 1"

He looked terribly worried. . . .

44 Well, my wife wants — Oh, wait till I'm back !
I'll drop you, anyway." And he was off, his brown
coat flouncing peevishly. Through the open door
I could see Napier, his coat open, everything about
him open, standing in what looked like a wide
courtyard. . . .

“Mats quelle belle silhouette /" chattered the old
nun. “ Le vrai type brun anglais . Mais c’est
naturel qu’il soit fou avec ces yetcx l&. . . . "

Napier and Conrad Masters walked across the
courtyard towards a tall red-looking building.
Its door was pointed like a church door, and win-
dows here and there were alight. Through one of
them a nun was looking at me. On the sill outside
the largest window of all, which was not alight,
stood a pineapple and some grapes on a plate.

I 9 2

THE GREEN HAT

5

After that chill, stuffy lodge the night was like
a kiss. The dark shapes of Masters's Renault
and Napier's taxi faced each other, their dimmed
lamps lighting only the darkness. The chauffeur
of the Renault looked to be asleep at the wheel.
I hoped Venice was asleep, too. The driver of the
taxi was nowhere to be seen, and stealthily I was
approaching the dark shape of the taxi, mentally
communicating to Venice that it would be only
decent of her to be asleep, when the taxi-driver
emerged from the malodorous shape of the lavabo .
“Elle dort , je crois ," the fool shouted at the top of
his voice, and I bolted into the capacious Renault.

“ Sorry to wake you," came the mutter of Con-
rad Masters from the open door. “ Where are you
staying ? "

Through the front window I saw the door of
the taxi close. Napier would tell Venice he had
seen me, and she would be surprised I had not
spoken with her. “ You were asleep," Napier
would say, but she would still be surprised. . . .

“ Look here," Masters said persuasively, one
foot on the footboard, “ why not come to my place
for a while? Come along, it won't kill you. A
night-hawk like you. My wife has a party of some
sort. Dancing, bridge, Parisian-Americans. . . ."

Dancing, bridge, Parisian-Americans ! The end
of a perfect day. . . .

“ It's another form of septic poisoning," I
pleaded. “ Take me to the Westminster, Masters,
and let me sleep. And you'd better get a room
there as well and spend the night in peace. ..."

The taxi in front of us bumped and rattled away.

THE RED LIGHTS

*93

Masters muttered wearily : “ Well, I will probably
have to take a hand if you don't. Most of 'em
dance, but I left three bridge maniacs stranded to
come on here. They stay up to all hours, the
blighters. . .

Smoothly the Renault picked its way among
the pits and chasms of the fearful boulevards of
outer Paris. “ Their last chance of ever being
mended,” Masters muttered, " went when the
Germans lost the war. ..."

“ All right,” I said sulkily, “ I’ll come. Bridge,
dancing, Parisian-Americans. . . . What a mon-
strous life you lead. Masters. But what about
that miracle ? ”

“ Can’t tell,” he muttered. “ Can’t tell. Seemed
bucked up a bit, of course. Took notice,
recognised him, and that’s something. But you
can’t tell. ...”

“ She’ll live,” I said.

" I’m glad you’re so certain,” snapped the cap-
tain of men. “I’m so little certain that I put
that young man on his honour to look round
again to-morrow afternoon.”

" On his honour !” I said. “ On his honour?”

“ What’s the matter with his honour ? Looks
all right to me. ...”

“ But he’s going South in the morning ! ”

“ He mustn’t go ! ” snapped Masters. “ That'll
be your job. We must give her one more chance
. . . one more piqure. It’s essential that he
shouldn’t go to-morrow. You must prevent him.”

" I’ll try,” I said. “ But ...”

“ But surely he won’t want to go ! "

" Oh, he won’t want to go . . . ”

Masters stared at me thoughtfully. “ Dm,” he
said. “ Urn.”

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THE GREEN HAT

" Of course,” I said, “ you never know. ...”

" Well,” said Masters, ” now she’s seen h im
once she’ll expect to see him again. It’s only
natural.”

"Of course," I said. "Naturally. ...”

Smoothly ran the Renault with the scarlet
wheels. The black lion found in us no little Citroen,
cowered before us, slunk back into the jungle of
nameless boulevards. Montparnasse showed lights
to hold us, faces in cafds, singing groups of young
men, little flashing women with lots of hair like
dyed haloes. Artists. Swiftly we fled through
the darkness, the stillness, the deep shadows of the
phantom fortress of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
away we went from the ancicn rigime, the haute
nobCesse, across the river to the nouveau rigime, the
moblesse, down the stately slope of the Avenue
Hoche into the sweet valley of the Parc Monceau,
where lived the dashing Mrs. Conrad Masters, with
bridge, dancing, Parisian-Americans. . . .

" You can't,” that man muttered, “ expect her
to be reasonable. ...”

" No,” I said, " I suppose not. ...”

" Nice 1 " snapped Masters. " Good God,
nice I

CHAPTER SEVEN

For Venice /

i

AT white clouds hurried over the pale
blue roof of the rue de la Paix. Spring,
the first day before the first day of
spring, the day that is not spring but is
as a voice of spring crying in the wilder-
ness of the chilly heavens : “ Here is spring, and lo I
these are the clouds of winter fleeing before her,
white as polar bears, and as stupid. Enjoy, enjoy
Le printcmps I " Anxious the fat white clouds
seemed, most anxious, hurrying from the vanities
of the rue de la Paix towards the Cathedral of Our
Lady, that they might pray, the poor clouds who
know not that the pagan gods are dead, the poor
clouds, who love the winter, against the return of
Persephone from the anus of Plutus. The stormy
brittle sunlight, eager to play with the pearls and
diamonds of Van Cleef, Lacloche and Cartier, aye,
and of Tecla also, chided away the fat white clouds,
and now the sun would play with one window of
the rue de la Paix, now with another, mortifying
one, teasing another, but all in a very handsome
way.

Early the next morning it was when I found
myself looking upon these mighty diversions, but
I had so much rather been asleep. My bedroom
looked down on these things, but unfortunately

195

THE GREEN HAT

196

not from a great height, for they are not tall, the
hotels of Paris ; and men are sent round the
streets of Paris first thing in the morning, to
the end that people may not fail to be aware
of the beauty of shuttered shops, some of
these men being directed to push along enormous
tin barrels with which to make a carmagnole
of dust, whilst others are placed on ancient
taxi-cabs with especially adjusted gears and
magnified horn-power. There is no peace in
the world, that is what it is. There is no
peace in Paris.

I lay in bed, staring through the lace curtains.
What had happened, what were the alarums and
excursions of that grey day yesterday, which had
leapt at me from the darkness as I made to
return to England after four months of pleasant
wandering ? Iris was ill unto death, Napier was
enchanted. . . .

Men, some in shirt-sleeves, were taking down
the heavy, grey, burglar-proof shutters of the
shops opposite. Set in the small windows above
the shops, the modistes' assistants seemed to be
talking and talking. Some had hats in their nimble
hands, some other things. It is pleasant, maybe
it is the only pleasant pastime that does not ever
pall, to see and not be seen. And now the shop
windows began one and all to glitter in the stormy
brittle sunlight w'hich transmuted the pearls and
diamonds on yellow velvet into celestial jewels
fit to adorn the crown of the word pr intemps, than
which there is not a more beautiful word in all the
languages of the world. In the great window of
Edouard Apel et Cie., whence in the long ago had
come to this person such polite but manly note-
paper, stood richly white and coloured papers.

FOR VENICE!

197

boxes of lacquer, ebony, and cedarwood, flaming
quills and great cut-glass bottles for ink, and many
another device to make one realise how pleasant
writing must be for those who do not have to write.
Before a shop not far from Tecla's, which dis-
played the most charming baubles of all and
completely deceived the sun, two short dark
Semitic men and a lanky Semitic youth were
having some difficulty with their shutters. The
shutters did not look new, far from new, but may-
be, I thought, a new burglor-proof arrangement
has been wrought on them, and that would be
causing the difficulty. The traffic had as yet
but caressed the rue de la Paix, and through the
open window one might hear the rising anger of
the two short Semitic men with the lanky Semitic
youth, an anger which seemed to call for and to
attain a cuneiform language. Then a fourth man,
also in shirt-sleeves, came out of the shop, a
patriarchal mountain of a man with a great black
beard and a mighty nose, who might that very
moment have come from a breakfast of dates in a
tent over against Ur of the Chaldees, and instantly
I knew him for what he was, a millionaire. Many
were the race-horses he owned, and often you
would see him at Longchamps, talking to a beauti-
ful woman in a deep voice about hiraseli, for that
was a vain and terrible man, and the worst of it was
that he was always right about everything, whether
it was a horse, a jewel, a woman, an antique, or
the fall of a card. With one look of his eye he
scattered the two short Semites and the lanky
Semitic youth, who were his two brothers and
his son, who were also millionaires, and in a trice
he had those shutters off that window, and lo I
there, royally alone against terraces of dingy green

THE GREEN HAT

198

velvet, sat a brown Buddha with what looked like
the largest emerald in the world in the middle of
his forehead, but maybe it was only the second
largest. The last time I had been in Paris there
had been a golden chair in that window, golden
arms and legs and back and sit-piece and all, and
so it was no wonder that that man owned race-
horses and said “ Banquo ! " to half-a-million
francs while yawning, and rightly, for he always
won, as I know to my cost. And one night he
had come mto the rooms at Cannes with a great
ruby on his finger. Only he would, of course, but
apart from the ethics of the thing it was an amazing
ruby, crimson as blood and clear as a glass of
Burgundy. “ But what a stone ! " cried Billee
Pontheveque, a cocotte who sat at the table losing
all the money that she earned by breaking every
Commandment but one, for she adored her father
and mother and never failed to put aside for them
as much as she gave in tips to the croupiers ; but
she never saw her parents, she would say, because
of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her
health to take cocaine on an empty stomach.
" Yes, it is flawless/' said the deep voice of that
terrible man, shouting “ Banquo ! " as an after-
thought to some poor devil who thought he was
going to get away unchallenged with fifty thousand
francs. " You can have it, child. Here you
are." But Billee Ponth6veque had always a
sense of the proprieties, and so, as the saying is
among the vulgar, she damned his blasted cheek
for offering her so valuable a present in public,
but he said that made no matter, for it was just
because the ruby was flawless that it was quite
valueless. “ If only it had the smallest flaw," he
boomed, 99 it would be beyond price, for anyone

FOR VENICE!

199

can counterfeit a flawless ruby so that no expert
can tell it from the original. ..."

“ De la part de Madame Arpenden ," said a voice,
and after the passage of curses and cat-calls which
are peculiar to the telephones of Paris, I heard
Venice's voice.

“Venice! Venice!"

“ That will do," she said. “ Oh, that will do
from you, thanks very much. Naps told me he
saw you last night in that odd place, but did I
see you?"

“ You were asleep, Venice ! But I am so glad
to hear your voice after all these months, you
wouldn't believe how glad. Venice, how are you?"

“ I can't tell you now, I have to buy things.
Listen, child, will you give me lunch to-day? Naps
is busy for lunch. Listen, you must give me lunch
to-day. I hate Paris."

“ But Napier told me you were going South
to-day ! "

“ Oh, Naps is mad ! " A boyish voice, a very
boyish voice Venice had, even on a telephone in
Paris. “Not dangerously mad, but just mad. I
never knew such a silly, one can't ever arrange
anything beforehand with him. We are going by
the evening train now, though we had everything
booked for the one this morning. Listen, are you
going to give me lunch? Oh that's a dear. About
one, here at the Meurice. . . "

“Venice!" I called, but she was gone, and I
could see her striding intently through the sombre
halls of the Meurice, lovely Venice, like sunlight,
just like English sunlight. And keeping my mind
to sunlight, and avoiding all thoughts of death
and dark enchantment, I said to myself that I
would stay in Paris now that I was in Paris, rather

200

THE GREEN HAT

than return to London, foi over London lay a
memorable fog, so said the Continental Daily Mail ,
as also it said Hats Off To France, the guileless
thing. . . .

“De la part du Docteur Mastaire” said the tele-
phone this time, and there was that captain of
men muttering, as he had promised he would in
return for my playing bridge till all hours for his
sake, that there was little change in Iris, but what
little was for the better rather than for the worse.
“ But don’t go thinking,” said he sharply enough,
“ that she’s nearly out of the wood yet, because
she isn't. And, by the way, she seems to want to
see you, but remember that you'll do her the
worst turn you can if you let that boy leave Paris
to-day.”

" Yes, but,” I said, but I spoke only to the roar
of the Parisian scene, and I thought : “ Oh, well !
He isn't going till the evening, anyhow.” And,
still keeping my mind from dwelling on death and
dark enchantments, I renewed my decision to
stay in Paris a while, no matter how bitterly my
sister might inveigh against me for letting her
return to England unaccompanied. By now the
rue de la Paix was languishing brilliantly in the
stormy sunlight, and from my bath I could glimpse
the cars lounging up and down and women walk-
ing swiftly by, intent on errands of the greatest
importance and looking as attractive as only
women can look when they are not thinking of
men, while Englishmen and Americans walked
seriously towards the chairs on the boulevards
that they had read about in Nash's Magazine.
Then my sister's car passed by towards the Place
de l'0p6ra, and she sitting forward with an air of
moment, the ferrule of her parasol poised above

FOR VENICE!

201

the shoulder of the chauffeur, poor Mr. Hebble-
th waite, who hated the French so ! "I will tell
her," I said, " that I am regrettably detained in
Paris owing to the call of my art, my Work, for I
have just thought of a tale about a man who would
not dance with his wife, and would you have me,
I will put to her frankly, write a tale like that in
a London fog?"

And it was while debating with myself over
this silly fancy about a man who would not dance
with his wife, for some good reason that I would
no doubt hit upon in due course, and while con-
gratulating myself that I had throughout the
morning successfully avoided thinking of any of
my friends' troubles, that I passed through the
soft-carpeted and sombre halls of the Meurice,
towards Venice, towards Venice, where she sat in
a deep chair behind a paper, while in deep chairs
all around sat people drinking cocktails and talk-
ing in low voices. All people talk in low voices
when in the Meurice, and that, I dare venture to
say, is one of the amenities peculiar to the Meurice
among the hotels of all the world ; but that is as
it may be.

GE

O

202

THE GREEN HAT

z

Venice was in high looks that day, Venice was
all of a glitter, and that was because, she said at
first, of this and that. But we had no sooner
passed through the glass doors into the restaurant
than she said, she almost cried, that something
marvellous had happened just a moment before.
“What do you think?" she dared me to guess,
and when I said that I thought I would have some
oysters she said she was too excited to eat
anything, but might she have some ham and a
glass of lager beer?

Venice hadn't met my sister but once or twice,
but they had met again that morning in some
shop or other, “ and 1 was complaining bitterly,"
said Venice, “ about Napier, how he made a per-
fect jumble of everything by never knowing his
own mind for two minutes running, and how we
couldn't now find any sleepers in to-night’s train
— when she offered to lend us her car to take us to
Monte Carlo ! She couldn't bear the sight of it,
she said, for another week at least, and that gives
us plenty of time to get theie and send it back,
doesn't it? Now fancy your having a sister like
that !"

“And how is Napier?" I asked. “I only saw
him for a moment. ..."

“ I can tell you," said Venice in a sudden sombre
moment, “ that I'm not a bit sorry to be leaving
Paris as quick as quick. Naps has been working
awfully hard lately, and here we come away for a
holiday and the first thing he does is to go off the
deep end about this old friend of his being ill."

“ Well, she is rather ill/' I said.

FOR VENICE!

203

" Yes, I’m awfully sorry, really I am. I've
never met her, but I saw her once, one night at
the Loyalty just before my "

“ Yes, I remember, Venice."

“ And I thought she was the most lovely woman
Td ever seen, and rather sad -looking, which made
her lovelier than evei. She'd be sad, I suppose,
because of her two husbands and the things people
say about her; for they do say some things, don't
they ? "

44 They l They , Venice, will say anything. . . . "

“ Yes, of course, but you know what I mean.
And Naps, you see, can't bear anyone to be ill
and miserable, and I’m sure he's got an idea that
Mrs. Storm is lonely up there, but really, I think,
he might consider himself a little, don't you? And
so I ordered the car at three o'clock this afternoon,
and off we'll go. He'll be surprised when he gets
here, ..."

" Yes," I said, “ I suppose he will."

“ Well," said Venice, sticking out that Pollen
jaw, “ there's no use in hanging about Paris, is
there? And so I sent him a message to the Em-
bassy, where he's been all morning, to come as
soon as he could and not worry about getting
' sleepers.' And as I've already had his things
packed we can start off as soon as he's here, which
will be while we're at coffee, I shouldn't wonder."
That Pollen jaw ! What, I wondered, was Venice
thinking of when she stuck out that Pollen jaw
like that? Maybe she had been disturbed by
Napier's white-thunder looks when they got back
to the hotel last night, and was wanting to get
him to herself and normal as quickly as she could
— and Provence, Oh Provence ! It is not every
day that a girl can motor through Provence with

204

THE GREEN HAT

her lover. Venice's love was like a solid marble
monument, and I said to myself that one should
respect illness but also one should respect love, and
so I held my peace.

Napier had not come by the time we had finished
luncheon, and as we took two deep chairs in the
comer of the lounge, where we would have coffee,
Venice asked me if I knew anything about the
psychology of men as regards children. When I
had picked myself up I said that I would reserve
my defence, laughing heartily the while, but now
there was a cloud of thought over Venice's
mad-blue eyes, and she was ever so serious, a fat
cigarette tortured between her full, pale, dry lips.
Venice, you know, said she hated the taste of lip-
salve; but, with no idea at all of ever doubting
Venice's word, one had noticed that it was only
since her marriage that she had grown to hate it
so consistently, and so it might be that Napier
had made a face after kissing her one day, for it
is the affectation of Englishmen to be tiresome
about cosmetics, and if they are not tiresome about
cosmetics they cannot be the right sort.

u Sugar?" I asked, and she nodded intently,
her mad-blue eyes absorbed on a point of the thick
carpet.

‘'How," I said, “you will love Provence I"

" Listen," she said sharply. Wise those eyes
were now, and steady as stars in a cavern,
looking into me as though judging me, balancing
life.

“ Well?" I said, to get it over. But what could
she know?

She made herself look unimportant. “ Oh, it's
only," she said, “ that I can't have a baby." And
she looked at me with a frantic smile, and because

FOR VENICE!

205

every second of her twenty-one years seemed to
me to be in that frantic smile I did not know what
on earth to say, saying : “ You have probably

been to some silly doctor ”

*' I haven’t ! " she whispered, so fiercely that an
old gentleman nearby almost spilled his coffee.

“ Hush, Venice !"

" But I haven’t been to any doctor "

“ Well, then,’’ said I wisely, “ in that case,

of course, I don’t see ”

“ Oh, you don’t ! ” she whispered with her fine,
savage impatience. “ I tell you, my child, that I
can’t — I just feel that I can't, in my bones I feel
it, that I'll never, never, never !” And she put a
cloud of smoke between us to make her smile look
plausible, but through the smoke her eyes looked
as though they were holding back a pain.

“ Venice, darling,” I pleaded, " I’m not old
enough to deal with an emergency like this.
What you need is a man of Hilary’s years to turn
you over and smack you and tell you that as long
as you’re such a child you don’t deserve to have
one—”

“ I'm so miserable,” she said.

" But it’s absurd, Venice ! I mean, it's just

nerves, you can’t possibly know ”

"Do you actually think,” she grabbed a cigar-
ette fiercely from my case, " that I’ve got to go
to some dud doctor and have him poking about
all over me before I know what’s me ! Of course
I can know, and I do know, and it's a shame, and
I daren’t tell Napier. . . .”

" You better hadn’t, on such insufficient evi-
dence. I know what I’d do.”

“ Darling, darling, darling I Tell me, do men
love children ? Really, really, I mean ? Would

206

THE GREEN HAT

Napier hate it if he knew that I was as barren as
that old fig-tree "

“ Venice, how dare you let your nerves get the
better of you like this I I’ve only got to be away
from England for four months, and I find you in
this silly state I "

“ Oh, but answer my questions ! Why is every-
one so awful these days ! You see, I never know
what's going on in Napier's mind, never ! Do you
think I would if he loved me?"

“ 4 If ? ' " I said. " 1 If/ Venice ? " Was I now
to defend Napier's love for Venice ? And then I
found that she was looking at me with wide-open,
motherly, amused eyes.

“ You don't actually think," she almost laughed,
" that I ever thought that Napier loved me?"

" Well, I have thought so," I bravely admitted.
“ Certainly I have. It is quite usual."

44 But isn't my gentleman friend stupid!" she
suddenly giggled. “ Of course, I know he loves
me — as much as he can ever love anyone. But
that's all, don't you see. ..."

She stared at the wounded end of her poor
cigarette, and lit another from my case, as that
was handy. The number of cigarettes that girl
smoked, and how she tortured them !

“ You see," she said, knitting together her
golden eyebrows so that I should see, " Napier
can't love like other people — me, for instance,
and perhaps you, though I'd have my doubts
about you. I suppose people are bom like that,
and you've got to take it or leave it. Napier loves
just as much as he can — which means that he's
willing, oh anxious, to do anything in the world for
you — but you're never quite sure what he's thinking
about while he's doing it. See what I mean ? "

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207

" I try hard, Venice/'

“ Yes. And so, you see, you've always got a
feeling that he's keeping something back in him-
self, something rather important, if you see what
I mean, something you can't get a grip on but
that's there to be gripped, that Napier would like
to be gripped, if you see what I mean "

" I'll tell you what I see, Venice. I've seen it
before, and so I recognise it "

“ But I don't want to hear about your fancy
friends ! I want to talk about myself."

“ The matter is, Venice, that any woman in
love with a reserved man will pass her spare time
in ascribing stormy villainies to his secret nature,
whereas generally the poor devil is "

" Stormy villainies, said Venice quietly, “ is
good."

“ Women," I said largely, cursing myself, " are
always making themselves miserable about what
they don't see in a man, as though what they did
see wasn't quite enough."

The full dry lips ravaged the cigarette for a while.
Then they said, thoughtfully : “ The other night
we were dining at Fay Avalon's, just a very few
of us, and when someone said that Mrs. Storm
was a nymphomaniac Napier went as white as
death "

“ And what did the other guests do, Venice ?
It's the least Napier could have done, as she’s an
old friend of his."

u Of course," said Venice very calmly, looking
into her cup as though for more coffee, " I don't
know her, or anything about her, except just what
people say. And I'd never have known that Naps
even knew her if I hadn't seen him speak to her
that night at the Loyalty. That was the night

208

THE GREEN HAT

her brother died, wasn't it? Napier had never
mentioned her name before — nor since, if it comes
to that, until last night, when he seemed so upset
about her that after a while I upped and said he
could go and take a room at the nursing-home if
he liked "

''Wasn't that rather harsh, Venice? After all,
he's known her a very long time, and it upsets
anyone to see an old friend very ill."

‘ Oh, I know, I know !" she said eagerly. " You
mustn't think I was jealous, but I suppose it just
got on my nerves a bit, seeing that he'd never
spoken about her before. And that's why, you
see," she showed all her very white teeth in an
utterly insincere smile, " I'm rather wretched
about this idea of not having any children. Do
listen, please listen ! Oh, why is everyone so tire-
some I I'm not talking about Mrs. Storm now,
but about the Mrs. Storms of life. You see, they've
got a lot more to give a chap than anyone like me
has — I mean to say, they know how to bring every-
thing out of a man, how to make him a lover and
all that — a real lover, I mean, a fire-and-ice, pits-
and-mountains, sunlight-and-shadows, nice-and-
nasty sort of lover, whereas people like Napier
and me are just the same with each other as
millions of other people, the men being pretty
good duds at loving and the women even worse
duds at being loved, if you see what I mean. Oh,
I know ! A man might be a just come-here-girl-
oh-darling lover with one woman and then be a
marvellous lover with another, just because, you
see, she'd know how to make him be. Of course,
with their experience . .

I sat there in that deep armchair, subdued by
the thought of the awful helplessness of men and

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209

women to understand one another, and of the
terrible thing it would be for some of them if ever
they did understand one another, and how many
opportunities the devil is always being given of
making plunder out of decent people. Here was
Venice groping blindly in the corridors of her love,
looking for the one golden key which she couldn't
find among the treasures there displayed. For there
were treasures there. Venice was quite certain,
marvellously certain she was, that Napier loved her
as much as he could ever love anyone. Oh, but
her love was quite big enough to cope with that
nonsense of Napier's ! And, since the love of a
good woman for a man is a compliment to all men,
maybe I looked at her with understanding, for she
gave me a sudden sharp smile, and said, quite
calmly ; '‘And so, you see, if I don't have a baby
soon I'll bust."

" Darling, darling, darling i " a low voice mocked
behind us so that we started, and there above our
deep chairs stood Napier, and I remember how
he gave me one quick clear look, not in the least
a conspiratorial look, but just a clear look, as
though the last time he had seen me we had both
faced a great danger; and between two men there
can be no bond so faint and yet so binding as that
which is forged of an understanding which is un-
mentionable between them; you may not like
the bond, as I most sincerely did not like it, for
it was Venice who was my friend, but there it is,
a bond of invisible wire that cuts at the wrists
of the mind.

Napier looked composed, but always the fever
lurked in the dark eyes, always the dark eyes looked
as though they were suffering from what neither
you nor he could tell. That greyhound, sensitive

210

THE GREEN HAT

and doubtful and poised ... for flight ! And he
somehow looked queerly festive in that sombre,
conventional hall, with his faded I Zingari tie and
the brown Shetland waistcoat which was for the
most part unbuttoned.

“ Oh, Naps, such a wonder 1 ” cried Venice on
the instant, and I saw what one is so apt to see
after an intimate talk with a woman, that one
has only been talking to a mood. Venice was in
an instant as I had always seen her with Napier,
impetuous, imperious, gay. ” What do you think.
Naps I I have got a car, a lovely car, swift and
shining, and a man called Hebblethwaite for
chauffeur. Now what do you think of that?”

“ 1 think,” said Napier gravely, smiling at me,
“ that it must be an English car. And what do
you intend doing about it? Driving in the Bois?
What?”

" Driving in the Bois ! Am I mad ! My child,
it's his sister’s car, and she has lent it to us, and we
are going South in it, that is what we are going to
do. And I ordered Mr. Hebblethwaite at three,
and I've had all your things packed, and I’ve
settled the bill, so we can go right away.”

Napier stared at her — he was sitting now — and
it was as though he had put his hand to his mouth
and placed a smile there. It was a very charming,
helpless smile. I said something to the effect
that I must go now, but no one was taking any
notice of me. Venice was saying, in a voice
tangled with confusion, impatience, a sort of
gaiety : " But, Naps, you don’t mean to say you
want to stay still another night in this foul Paris,
when we might be in the sun ! ”

Napier scowled, the smile still on his mouth*
“ Of course, I don’t want, but ”

FOR VENICE!

211

" Oh, but Naps, I'd like to go straight away,
right away, as the Yankees say ! And I thought
we might have tea at Fontainebleau and I'd show
you the place where I was at school. ..."

" Now look here," Napier scowled, touching her
knee with one finger, " I can't quite do that,
Venice. You see, I made a sort of promise to
that doctor fellow that I would go and sit with

Iris just for a while this afternoon "

"Oh, I see," said Venice. "Well, in that case. . . ."
" Give her an idea — that's what the doctor
fellow said — that some of her friends care whether
she lives or dies, for anyone would be rather
lonely up there. What? I went round for a
minute this morning just to inquire, but I didn't

see her, as they said that "

" I thought you were at the Embassy this
morning," Venice said, in a very natural voice :
and she crushed out her cigarette on the marble
top of the table, and she picked up her vanity-case.
" Yes, so I was," Napier scowled, " but I just

went round there for a minute "

" Oo, what a long way to go for a minute I"
sighed Venice. " When one can always tele-
phone. ..." And she rose from her chair.
Somehow an immense new dignity had suddenly
come on Venice. Napier rose, facing her, smiling
under his scowl, as though she had made a joke.
I rose, saying that I must be going. . . .

" As a matter of fact," said Venice brightly,
" as I knew you were so worried about her I rang
up that place this morning, and they told me
she was assez bien, if you see what I mean. ..."

" Venice, that was kind 1" Napier smiled with
his whole thin, fine face, and I thought how glad
I was that he didn't know what had caused Iris's

212

THE GREEN HAT

illness, for would he then have smiled gratefully
at Venice for inquiring after her? And he said,
as though happy in her understanding : “ I mean,
we can start off first thing in the morning, can't
we? What? It's rotten luck, cutting in on your
holiday like this, but — well, friendship has
duties. . . ."

" But of course I understand, Naps ! " And
Venice turned at me, smiling as though to show
me what sort of a man that Napier was. As
though she didn't understand ! As though she
didn't know the duties of friendship ! She said
to Napier, with a fine air of business settled :
“ Well, I'll just go upstairs now and tell Mary to
unpack some things again. And I do so hope,
Naps," she said with a fine large smile, “ that
your friend won't die, for then how will I manage
a man who has nothing left to live for?" And
Venice turned to me, and her hand was in mine,
and we were saying good-bye, when Napier said
briskly :

“ Come on, then. We'll go now. Might as
well, now the car's there. . . ."

" But, Naps ! " Venice turned on him, stared
wide at him. . . .

" Oh, come on," said Napier, as though eaten
by impatience.

“ But 1" she pleaded desperately. “ But, Naps,
I don't really want to go now a bit if you would
rather stay until to-morrow. . . ."

“ I don't want to stay," said Napier, quite
reasonably, but he turned away as he spoke. One
saw the set white profile. “ Come along, Venice.
There's been enough talk about this already. . . ."

" But, Naps," said Venice bitterly, " it's wrong
of you to go now, if she needs you. You know

FOR VENICE!

213

it's wrong and naughty, what you're doing. Naps
dear, I'd very much rather not go now if you
don't mind "

" Well, you 11 jolly well have to go now, if at
all," Napier tore at her so sharply that she stared
at him dumbly for a full second, and then she
made a white smile, half to him, half to me.
" Silly baby," she said. " Such a silly baby. . . ."
And she was again about to say good-bye to the
unwilling spectator when Napier broke in, to me,
beginning with astonishing grimness and ending
quite conversationally : "I say, if you should
happen to see Iris in the course of the next few
days, you might tell her I couldn't stop, and" —
here the grimness suddenly ended — " say good-bye
from me. Will you? What?"

I said of course I would, and then he took
Venice's arm to lead her away. But Venice
dragged, her eyes intent on the carpet, and when
she suddenly looked round at me I saw that her
eyes were brimming with tears.

"Men!" she smiled. "Men !"

"Men!" mocked Napier, but he smiled, too.
"What?"

" But don't you think it's a shame ! " she bit-
terly appealed to me. " There's Mrs. Storm very
ill and expecting to see Napier, all lonely up there,
and here Naps puts me in the beastly position of
a wife who '

But I was thinking that the shame of it lay in
the disadvantage at which a woman always is
with a man whom she loves more than she feels
he loves her, the disadvantage of never knowing
how far she may use an artificial pride, for there
is no real pride in a heart in love, without up-
setting the apple-cart.

214

THE GREEN HAT

" Nonsense, Venice," Napier was saying, and
it was his mildness, his calmness, that was so
astonishing now. It was as * hough the man had
suddenly found peace : as though love-lost Tristram
raving in the wilderness bad, in a sudden flash,
realised that he was trying God too far. . . .

“ Nonsense, Venice," he scowled, still holding
her arm. “ She isn't beginning to expect me and
she never did. I just turned up by chance. . . ."
He turned to me with that clear, not conspiratorial,
look in his eyes. " You will say good-bye from
me, won't you?"

“ Of course," I said. " I may be seeing her
to-day."

" Yes, just say good-bye," said Napier, and as
he and I shook hands Venice laughed nervously :
“ Dear, how serious ! I can't bear good-byes. . . ."
And so she shook my hand without saying good-
bye, saying instead : "You have been a darling
to let me bore you with my nonsense, and I hope
you'll pray that it keeps line for us in your sister's
car. See you in London soon. ..."

And away they went, Napier and Venice, he
still holding her arm just above the elbow, she
still appearing to drag a little, across the now
deserted and darkening lounge to the glass doors,
which a small boy opened to them. But the small
boy must hold it open, for they stood in the door-
way a short while, as it might be they were arguing,
and through the gloom of the afternoon I could
see Napier's set white profile, drawn in ivory it
might have been, and the way he seemed to be
smiling grimly into Venice's upturned face, and I
could see the way Venice's face suddenly lit right
up with a smile, just like a garden with the sun
after rain. Now what could he have said to make

FOR VENICE!

215

her smile so, or had he said just any little thing,
which her love, most princely alchemist, had
straightway transmuted into a golden word?

He has said farewell to his love, I said to myself,
and now, if love has left any honour at all in him,
he must convince himself that there never was
any love to say adieu to, for even so much would
be a disloyalty to Venice. He has renounced his
love, I thought to myself, as a man of honour
should do, but he knows that a man of honour is
not worthy the name unless he can also convince
himself that there never was any love to renounce,
for that would make him feel martyred for his wife's
sake, and that would be a treachery to Venice. . . .

And, smoking one more cigarette in the calm
security of the darkening, deserted lounge, while
a waiter or two began laying the small tables
roundabout for tea, I seemed to understand Napier
as he were myself, and he the most different man
from me that could well be found. Looking at the
thing full and square, you might say that Napier
had done a caddish thing; in fact, that was what
you had to say, looking at the thing full and
square; but it is a mistake to look at everything
full and square, and it is too easy to dismiss
people's actions as “ caddish " and the like, for such
are no more than words coined to save people
from wearying their minds with undue thinking,
and tiresome people will go on and on using them
with a great show of conviction, in the very same
way that they will put down a book by Mr. Shaw
or MaJtre Anatole France and say : “ Look at

Dickens ! "

Now Napier had suddenly come upon a queer
sort of peace following on a second's cruel decision
not to go and see Iris again, a very cruel decision.

2x6

THE GREEN HAT

I thought, and she no doubt expecting every
moment to see his face in the clouds all about her*
“ How like a man/' I could hear a feminine voice,
“ first to stain what he thinks his ‘ honour ' by
taking a mistress, and then to retrieve his idiotic
* honour ' by hurting his mistress I ” But, may-
be, how could one tell ? maybe Napier had sud-
denly realised, in the very moment that Venice
spoke, that if he went to sit with Iris even once
more he might fall right down into the pit of
dark enchantment and he might send all life but
that which he found in Iris to the deuce and never-
more return to Venice, to whom he was held
by every one of those principles that are born
in the blood of a Napier, a Hilary, a Guy de Tra-
vest. And I wondered what I would have done
had my life been so weighted and tangled wdth
people's emotions as Napier's must always have
been, and what, I wondered, would I have done
had I, in Napier's place, been as unaware of myself
until a fiercely revealing moment three nights
before my marriage to my betrothed? The answer
to that was very easy, and it was by the measure
of the ease with which it came that I could judge
of Napier’s struggle with himself to keep his pledge
to Venice, for never were two men so different as
Napier and me. I, I would have broken my troth,
that is what I would have done, and I would have
broken away from any other thing that stood in
the way of my passion, I would have fled father,
friends, career, honour, everything, at the call of
the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams.
There are better dreams / For so I remembered a
phrase in a book telling of the love of a lady of
the sea for a mortal man : There are better
dreams . . . .

FOR VENICE I

217

A waiter, no doubt wishing for something to
do, asked me if I would take tea, but I thanked
him, saying I would rather not, for it was not yet
half-past three, and saying to myself : “In ever}/
man there is always unfolding a dream of things that
never were and never can be, since life will always
be what it is and men and women will always be
what they are, and so we will always go on, men of
high fancies and low flights, and the higher the
fancy is the lower the flight will be, as it is written
in the Scriptures concerning vanity. And maybe
Napier had had his dream when he was very
young, and then the w'orld came along and told
him that his dream was very silly, and so he did
not dream any more, until one night he was ap-
palled to hear calling him a playmate's voice, but
a playmate's voice torn with the wonder of life
and the sadness of living, whispering to him :
There are better dreams. And he listened, and he
was lost, and then he found himself again in
renunciation, as so many Englishmen will always
be doing, for it is as true as any generalisation
can be to say of Englishmen that they will
often only find themselves when they have lost
themselves."

I could see Napier during those two days and
two nights before his marriage, I could see him
casting his mind this way and that way, to find
that each way lay dishonour, on Venice's side dis-
honour with cruelty, and on Iris's side dishonour
with whatever happiness can go with dishonour
to a man such as Napier; and that, I thought,
would be very little, for can a man of honour
embark on any dishonourable adventure without
first of all taking every care and precaution that
neither he nor his companion shall enjoy the fruits

G.H. P

2l8

THE GREEN HAT

of it ? But that, I thought to myself, is a woman's
thought, surely I am not becoming effeminate !

And you could see Napier scowling as he beat
his mind to know what a man should do, for you
might be sure that Iris had not tried to persuade
him, she would have loved him and left him, put-
ting the seal of her kiss on his lips and the seal of
her voice on Ins earn, telling him only to do w T hat
he thought was right. So Napier would be beating
his mind, always driving from him the phantom of
a compromise, a fair enough phantom, that : how he
would go to Venice and tell her that it had
happened to him, born vile, to do thus and thus,
and would she please forget him, for forgive him
she could not? But that was just what Venice
would do, proudly and imperiously she would
forgive him, and then he would have to confess
the real truth, which was not that he had held
Iris in his arms, but that he loved Iris with his
body and soul as he never could love Venice, that
he loved Iris and Iris loved him as though they
had drunk a love-philtre together, and in that way
he did not love Venice . . . but Venice, un-
fortunately, did love him in that very same way,
and you could see Napier just quailing before the
cruelty of telling Venice that, after all, he did not
love her. And you could see him marrying Venice,
thinking the while that maybe the best could be
made of a wretched business if Iris and he kept
to the promise they had sworn together, never to
meet again. And they had kept to it very stoutly,
the Iris who had plucked the device For Purity
from her heart had kept to her promise, and
Napier would have kept to his promise for ever
and a day but for the chance of illness in the ob-
scure silence of the Paris night; and so it had come

FOR VENICE !

219

to pass that he must see Iris yet once again, and
IrL maybe thinking that she was seeing her lover
in a dream, she who had nothing to live for and
did not care one fai thing if she lived 01 died. But
that dream, said Coni ad Masters later, saved her
life, that dream was the angel appointed to save
Iris from death, for that time. How wise was
Iris, how wise, she who knew that the Marches
were never let off anything. For even the angels
were against her.

But it was to Conrad Masters thai I had first
to break the news of Napier's -well, from Masters'
point of view, desertion while on duty. And
very whole-heartedly did that man swear, the
telephone simply throbbing with his pn gnant
mutter ; but I, thinking there could b^ little profit
in arguing at this time of day that the v hole thing
wasn't and never had been any of my business,
merely suggested : would it be any soi t of idea
for me to see her for a minute?

" Your

"But your instructions!" I pointed out.

" Whereas, if I may say so, you have so far been
so ‘nice' to me that I have lost five hundred
francs at bridge on your behalf." That is what
I was driven to saying, but I doubi if he heard
me, the telephones of Paris being very well

adapted for selective hearing, for all he said was
that he was due at the Boulevard Pierre Abel in
half an hour, and he would pick me up on the
way if I liked. If I liked I As though, Heavens
above, there was one single thing in all this

wretched business about which one might say,

with any hope of being attended to, " If I liked,
this," or " If I liked, that. . . /'

CHAPTER EIGHT

Piqure du Caut

I

WILIGHT was spreading her cloak as we
passed from the lodge into the flagged
yard. Several windows of the tall red
building were already alight, and on the
sill outside the largest window of all,
which was not alight, stood a pineapple and some
grapes on a plate.

Within, the feet fell chill on the chequered flags
of the hall; and this, by its size, should have been
a spacious-seeming hall, but that was not the
way it impressed one. There was one of those
bamboo hat-stands with a strip of looking-glass
running up the middle of it, but I followed my
companion's example in not leaving more than
my hat, for that was a chilly place. Through a
great oaken double-door on our right came mur-
murings of a religious nature and every now and
then a woman's manlike voice raised, no doubt,
in exhortation. Conrad Masters explained that
some of the nuns would be at their devotions
whenever they could manage, their religious
observances being so deranged by night-duty
and this and the other. “ But why,” I thought
to ask, " is Mrs. Storm here, for don’t you as
a rule immure your patients in the Avenue
Malakoff ? ”

PIQURE DU CCEUR 2ti

44 She wished it," said Conrad Masters sharply.
M She has a God."

And thereupon he left me, to see another patient
he had there, but I had not waited more than a few
minutes in the waiting-room, which had that
intangible odour of old cloth and illness, when I
was called upstairs by an old stem nun, hard and
silent as a rock, and I remember wondering :
M Good my God, if this should be Iris's day-nurse,
Oh poor Iris ! "

The stairway we ascended was handsome and
wide, of polished oak, the most dignified stairway
you could well imagine in a nursing-home. It
swept in a noble curve to a broad passage, also of
oak, as, no doubt, was only fit and proper in a
nursing-home patronised by une clientele curopdenne
la plus chic . But maybe it was a little too digni-
fied, I thought, it was sombre; and the old stem
ni in who was my guide did not seek to relieve the
atmosphere, giving me a massive black shoulder
and to my question no more than a stern whisper,
which was no more and no less than a shout of dis-
approval : 4t Assez bien t monsieur , assez bien . Nous
nous coupons en Dieu

The chill, the gloom, the nun, the air of religious
prostration, to which I am lamentably ill-accus-
tomed, had quite killed my spirit, else, as I did
my best quietly to follow her up the long, dark,
uncarpeted passage, I had put it to her that to
trust in God is very well but must He be trusted
at such little expense, for in these oaken passages
they had no more than a jet or two of gas-light,
and wasn't it also reasonable to suppose that
the patients behind the doors, each inscribed
with a Saint's name, would lie the more com-
fortably for a strip of carpet along the passages?

222

THE GREEN HAT

bram below, as though from the bowels of the
earth in labour, one might still faintly hear the
murmurings of a religious nature and the woman's
manlike voice raised, no doubt, in exhortation;
but I supposed the patients would not be minding
that for they would be Catholics, and I wondered
if Tri? was a Catholic, but nowadays that is the
last thing one ever learns about anybody, whether
they are Catholic. Anglican, Jew, or what they
are. . . .

As we came by a certain door, not far from
which a gas-jet flamed an ailing yellow, it was
opened from within and I saw before me the
sweetest face that I ever saw in my life, and I
knew that her God had been good to Iris.

“ Saur Virginie ” said the stern old nun, and I
am glad to say 1 never saw her again. Sister Vir-
ginie, looking up at me with a grave smile, for
siie was very little, greeted me by my name, and
do you know that I said : " Sister Virginie, had I
only met you last night I would have slept much
bettei than I did."

She had altogether such a neat and tidy look,
an inner look as well as an outer look, that you
must be sceptical indeed not to believe at once
that if ever there was a nurse to soothe away
death here she was before you, her hands folded
over her wooden crucifix, smiling up at you as
though you were a gentle friend. Her face was
oval and so white, but white in a different way, a
soft clear way, and it was only when I came to
think back on this sweet lady that I realised that
of course this would be so because Sister Virginie
never had used powder and such things, and that
must also be why she had the lips of a girl,
although what I could see of the dark brown eyes

PIQURE DU CGEUR 223

under the nun's coif showed the understanding of
more than forty years.

“ You see, I know your name/' she said. She
did not need to whisper. " Madame has a great
regard for you, I must tell you. Now, you must
not talk when you go in. She will look, look. But
you must not say one word. She will see you are
there, and it will make her content that her friend
has thought of her."

The oak door behind her was just ajar, and
within I could see a faint pink glow, as it might be
of a deeply-shaded light far in the room. Across
the door, just above Sister Virginia's coif, for she
was very little, was painted in faded black letter-
ing the name of a Saint, but what the Saint was I
could not make out, and the only other time I
called there I forgot to look.

" Now, remember," Sister Virginie was saying,
" you must not say one word in there. She will
look, that is all. But how she looks, as though
she is listening to the choir of angels 1"

“ Sister Virginie," I said, “ do you promise me
that she will not die?"

And Sister Virginie smiled up at me with a
gaiety that I have only seen on the still faces of
women in old French books.

“ To-day we have thought she will not die,"
she said, “ for last night we gave her a piqure
du cceur . . .

224

THE GREEN HAT

2

I wish I could describe that room in which 1
saw Iris lying, for it was such a strange room to
find in a nursing-home, and you would not have
been surprised to find the like m one of the hotels
in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. But the truth is
that I never yet was sure of the appointments of
any room I might find myself in, except maybe
that it was large or small, that it was panelled or
papered or distempered, and whether or not you
walked on a carpet, a strip of oil-cloth or a parquet
floor.

It seemed to me that I must walk a long way
to the bed near the window. It was a great four-
poster bed, and it had a very tall head, of carved
oak. There seemed to be but dark w r ood in that
strange sick-room, and the perfume of wood. Be-
neath my careful feet was a narrow strip of drugget
slanting from the door across to the bed, but on
all sides of this strip the floor shone vast and brown
in the dim light of a shaded lamp that stood on
the heavy oak mantelpiece.

Never was one so little conscious of the odours of
a sick-room, but, although I wouldn't swear to it,
there might have been the faint tang of furniture-
polish, and maybe, as I stole nearby the great wide
bed by the large window, that was the scent of
Napier's roses, which spread their heads from a
carafe on a small table near the foot of the bed.
Sitting against the carafe was a large white doll
with her head asleep among Napier's roses and a
red silk handkerchief tied around her wrist. Ah,
Mio Mi Marianne, unrepentant Magdalen, even
the toys of your sisters heed your dominion ! It

223

PIQURE DU CGEUR

was dark by the bed, for the light from the lamp
did not reach nearly so far. The blind was not
more than half-lowered down the large window,
and across the courtyard I could just see the light
within the lodge and, on the sill outside, the shape
of a pine-apple and some grapes on a plate.

The tali oak panel at the head cast a black
shadow over the darkness of the bed, and at first
I could no more than make out the shape of
Iris's head. I could hear the faint hush of her
breathing. Boy's head, curly head, white and
tiger-tawny. But gone now the tawny pride of the
tiger, gone the curls. Very tidily brushed her
hair was, tidily swept back from the forehead,
tidily lying on each cheek. It would be damp,
I thought, to lie so fiat. Her head lay like a
dark flower on the pillow.

She was asleep, I thought, and I was going
away, very well content to have heard the faint
but regular hush of her breathing. She had fallen
asleep, I thought, even as Sister Virginie had
left her, and could there be better news than that
she was asleep, breathing like a child ? Then
how frightened I was, just as I was about to steal
away, to see her eyes wide open, staring up at
me. Dark as her hair were her eyes, and almost
as big as her head. I was in terror, real damp
terror, lest she should be taking me for Napier.
I did not know what to do, and her great dark
eyes staring up at me. It would be like a stab
from the mists about her to be thinking it was
her lover who had come and to realise that it
was me. Then I was happy to see that there was
understanding in the dark, still eyes, she was not
taking me for Napier, she was not dreaming. She
was hurt, her eyes said. And, because I might

226

THE GREEN HAT

not speak, I just touched her cheek with my
hand, and the hair on her cheek was chill and
damp. But her eyes seemed to wish to be saying
something. She was hurt, her eyes said, but more
than that I could not understand, and so I bent
down nearer to her face. The skin was like thin
grey paper over her shoulder-blades, her lips were
chapped, and they drooped.

“Dying.

I shook my head sternly. Her lips were so dry
and rough, and now 1 saw through a mist what
I had not seen before, that her eyes were stricken
with fear. That is wdiat her eyes had wished me
to understand, that now she w*as terrified of dying.
That was what her dream had done, that was
what last night's friqurc du ccem had done. I
turned to go away. But her eyes, dark and stricken,
seemed to flutter, then they seemed to look at the
roses on the small table. What is it, I thought,
what is it she wants, and her eyes fluttering like
that ? Beside the white skirts of the doll whose
head was asleep among Napier's roses lay the
great emerald and a small tortoise-shell comb.
I thought of the tawny formal curls trembling like
voiceless bells before the looking-glass in my
flat above the mean lane, and when I took up the
small comb there might have been a smile on the
tiny grey face, like the shadow of a candle's flicker.
I passed the small comb through her hair, and it
passed so easily through the straight damp hair,
and then at last her eyes were dosed and I went
away as quickly as I could. Sister Virginie stood
a little way up the passage, but for reasons of my
own I did not wait for her to approach w r here I
stood under the ailing yellow flame of the gas-jet
but went towards the darkness where she was.

PIQURE DU CCEUR 227

“Were you good?" she asked me, and I think
I said that I had tried to be good. “ Rut, Sister
Virginie, she is afraid ! She is terrified !"

“ Then she is being good, too,” the nun smiled.
“ She has been too little afraid of dying, and then
it was we who were airaid." She looked at me
very seriously, and seemed to purse her lips. I
knew what she was going to ask, and I did not
know where to look. " Do you know, monsieur,
if we will be allowed to give her another ptqure
du cam* : Madame has been very unhappy, and
it is good to have happy dreams. . .

I do not remember what I said, but Sister Vir-
ginie said magnificently : " Then I will lie to her
for the time being," and when she had gone I
stood at the head of the oaken stairway, thinking
how I would like to be very alone for a minute or
two. Now and then a nun would pass softly but
quickly along the passage behind me, she would
seem to be sliding along, and then there came a
firmer step, and out of the tail of my eye I saw that
man’s great brown coat ballooning towards me.

" Well as can be expected," he muttered
gloomily. I looked at him. “ Better, really," he
muttered gloomily. "Ready?"

We went down the oaken stairway, treading
on our toes. There was a sickly whisper of incense
in the air, and I found that I had a headache.

“ But I wish to blazes," growled that man,
" that you hadn’t let that boy go. You could
have stopped him. . .

“ No," I said, " I couldn’t. Besides, I didn’t
want to."

“ Mm. Well, how did you find her? Wasted,
isn’t she?"

" Masters," I said, " she is lying there terrified 1"

228

THE GREEN HAT

For that was all I could think about, that and the
feel on my fingers of the damp, chill hair that
had no waves in it now.

Masters said : “ And a very good thing for her
she is terrified. Keep her bucked up, that will.
But I wish to blazes. . .

" Yes, I heard you,” I said, fumbling with the
latch of the great doors.

“ Women !” snapped Masters. “ Here, let me.”

“ I don’t suppose,” I said, “ that there are
many worse sights than a helpless woman
afraid. . . .”

“ You get used to it,” said Masters gloomily,
but I was thinking that Napier would not have
been at all used to it, and that he had been very
wise in his good-bye, for as sure as anything I was
that Venice could not have afforded to let Iris
have even one more piqure du cczur. . . .

" You don’t look so well yourself,” said
Masters.

“ Growing-pains, Masters. One is always grow-
ing up, at other people's expense. . .

PIQURE DU CCEUR

229

3

I was not to see her again for a while. That
man said : “ You did her no good the other day.
The reverse. She has something on her mind
she wants to say to you, and she can't, and it
worries her. Naturally. ..."

“ Your instructions/’ I said. " She will be
angry with you. Masters."

“ When she is well," snapped that captain of
men, “ she may burst, if I may say so. And so
I'll tell her. But in the meanwhile you will have
to wait ten days. Or more."

It was more, quite a while more, and when I
went again into the oak-room of the Saint whose
name I forgot to look at Iris met me with accusing
eyes. She did not turn her head, she just gave
me a sideways, accusing look. Turnings of head
were discouraged, she must lie very still, oh for a
long time, for that, it seems, is the way of septic
poisoning. And Masters had said to me in the
passage outside : “ If she as much as moves a
finger, God help you 1"

“ You should not be in Paris," she whispered,
not without vehemence. “ And why are you
laughing, please?"

“ Why, at your voice ! I do believe. Iris, that
it's stronger than you at last."

“ Yes, but you should not be in Paris, that I'm
sure of. You have waited to see me," she com-
plained bitterly, but I protested that never was
such nonsense, for why in the name of common-
sense would I wait to see her? “ But, Iris, the very
night I arrived in Paris I had an idea for a tale,
and I thought I would stay in Paris to write it."

230

THE GREEN HAT

" You mast tell it to me. Oh, at or»a\ Oh,
please. . . . " And the voice expired. And we
waited. " I can't laugh/' she said bitterly, "be-
cause it hurts Everything hurts. ..."

" Iris," 1 said, “ I am so sorry. ..."

" Yes." She gave me a long sideways look.

" Yes," she said. " But please to tell me your
tale. What is it about? What is it called?"

" No, Iris, I mustn't tell it to you. It was in-
discreet of me * j mention it, and you only just
returned from the valley of death. It is a terrible
story. Everyone dies. It is about a man who
would not dance with his wife."

" Yes, but . . . Oh, why wouldn't he dance
with his wife? What a silly man ! You do get
some beastly ideas, I do think. ..."

“ Please, Iris, be still and good ! That man
said he would fire me out for two pins." So grey
she looked, frail beyond frailty, in the gay after-
noon light. It was the fifteenth afternoon of
February, as I remember well.

Never moving her head, only her eyes vivid
with restless insurgent life, she whispered defiantly :
" As long as I lie quiet like this no one can do any-
thing to me or . . fire you out or anything.
You just . . . slay where you are. Be brave,
child. ..."

Now there were queer, funny things in the
great eyes of the still head. They were childish,
too, and I laughed at them, but she would not
laugh, because it hurt her.

We sat in silence, not to tire her. She lay flat
on her back, her head on a pillow which was so low
as to be only a pillow by courtesy. Her eyes would
be fixed on the ceiling, and then she would look
sideways at me, and that was when I seemed to

231

PIQURE DU CCEUR

see queer, funny things in her eyes. They vvere
as though glistening with bits of things . . .
fear, pride, a sort of childish glee, a sort of childish
naughtiness, a sort of childish shamefacedness.
It was as though she was terrified of her new
toy, and very proud of it, too — her returning
life. And then the shamefaced ness, an almost
guilty look, as though she had just cheated
someone out of something in a funny way. Not
that she hadn't been veiy clever either, her look
seemed to say. And somehow I was made a fellow-
conspirator m ail this ... in the terror, pride,
glee, raischitf, shamefacedness with which she was
deliciously playing with her new toy, returning
life.

She said suddenly, in an enormous voice which
she had obviously been husbanding for the purpose :
" No one wants me. . . . ” And I think, but I
am not sure, that she would have giggled if she
could.

" Iris, you’ll have Masters m here if you go
shouting like that.”

" He didn't want me, e\cn. .

"Who didn’t t Masters didn’t?”

" No. God.”

" Oh, I see,” I said.

She panted breathlessly, eager to be talking :
" I made my application, all ... all in order.
Forms ail filled in and everything But . . .
Oh, they weren’t impressed. Not a bit, they
weren’t ”

“ Oi, you’re talking too much, Iris !”

“ Oi to you. Listen. , . . The old man said
to me : ‘ Well, young woman, and what do you
want?’ I wasn't afraid, not a bit. Had all my
forms ready and everything. ... * What do I

232 THE GREEN HAT

want. Father? 1 says I. 'Why, I'm as good as
dead, that's what I am. Doctor's face all of a
blur, nurse's face all of a blur, temperature 106 —
why, I am dead, if it comes to that !' * Nonsense/
says God. 4 Never saw a woman more alive in ail
my life. Ho, Gabriel! Expel tins woman!' 4 Yes,
but ! ' I said. 4 I want to die, I do, I do T * In
that case,' says He, 4 death will be a great disap-
pointment to yon, We want none of your sort
here, young woman. Ho, Mu had, Gabriel! Eject
this sinner. She's still alive. . .

After a long pause I found those great eyes
looking at me very seriously. She whispered :
" Owe it to you. I mean, life. Thank you."

44 Iris, to me ! My dear, what rot ! "

44 Not rot at alL If you hadn’t been kind enough
to come round again that night to . . . inquire,
he'd have called and found only that old nun there
and she would have said . . . assez bien, and
away he’d have gone. And me, too. . . .

See?

44 And,” she said, 44 that ptomaine poisoning.
You dear, you dear ! Oh, how I like you when
you're not looking ! Genius, I call that. And
when . . . Masters told me, I laughed so they
had to give me morphia. Darling, these piqurts 1
I got holes all over me. ..."

44 Piqure du ccnir ," I let slip.

44 Piqure du what?"

44 Nothing," I said.

44 You're laughing at me," she whispered,
44 that’s what you’re doing. I’m going to close my
eyes now for five minutes. But don't go. Don’t
go. ..."

It was the fifteenth afternoon of February, as I
remember well, and Mademoiselle Printemps was

*33

PIQURE DU COEUR

dancing in the sunlight that fell in a shower of
gold on the window-sill, on which now stood three
nectarines and a large pear on a plate. But the
blind was drawn so that she could dance only in
a bright splash across the little mountain which,
I ventured to suppose, was made by Iris's toes.
In the shade of the room stood the small table,
and on the small table the doll with the red silk
handkerchief round her wrist sat sleeping beneath
tall sprays of mimosa, sprays of bright yellow
powdered with fresh gold. . . .

“ Yes," I heard her voice, faint, faint, and when
I looked round from the mimosa to her I saw that
her eyes had followed mine to a garden in the
South,

" Iris, I was to say good-bye. . .

" I know," she said gravely; and she smiled.
" I heard him. ..."

“ You heard him, Iris?"

“ Dreams, clouds, mists. Faces, phantoms,
fates, words. Yes, I heard him. ..." And she
smiled, with every bit of her eyes, as though to
reassure me. " That's quite all right," she said.

“ Iris, I'm so sorry," I said. " Do you . . .
promise that that's quite all right?"

She was looking at me with a smile. . . .

“ Promise," she suddenly sobbed, and her eyes
were streaming with tears. I was terrified.

“ Lie here," she sobbed, “ like a mummy . . .
no inside left, nothing left . . . thinking and
thinking and thinking . . . trying to lie to my-
self right and left, north and south . . . can't
have what I want, so must make up stories . . .
and you sit there stiff as a pole saying * Promise'
. . . call yourself a friend. ... You don't know
how ill I've been I "

G.H.

Q

*34

THE GREEN HAT

" I do, I do, Iris ! For pity's sake I If that
man comes in and finds you like th "

" And you think I'm awful," she whispered
helplessly. She stared at me. " You think I'm
awful," she said quite calmly.

" Iris," I said, " I like you. Of course, if I
didn't ..."

" Of course," she said, " he doesn't know. . . . "

" Of course," I said.

"And he'll never know. ..."

" Good," I said.

" As for me," she whispered . . .

On her forehead there were little beads of wet.
I wiped them off with my handkerchief, and she
said : " My nose, too, please. Had my hair waved
. . . but it never stays when you're not well.
Got to be well to have curly hair. ..."

" And, Iris, if you don't have it cut soon it will
be as long as a woman's hair."

" As for me," she whispered, " all this effort
wasted ... no playmate, no nothing. Masters
warned me, too. . . . Dead as dead, the poor
darling was. ..." Slowly, slowly, tears were
crawling down the tiny grey cheeks. Hastily
I wiped them away, hearing a step outside.
" Nothing, nothing . . ." she kept on whispering
with closed eyes, and I barely had time to whisk
away a tear from her eyelash as the door opened.

"Well?" that man muttered. "Killed her
yet?"

" I think she's asleep," I whispered.
" Ssh. . . ."

" Stuff 1 " snapped Masters. " She's been cry-
ing. Out you go."

Suddenly Iris said in that enormous, preserved
voice : " I have not been crying."

PIQURE DU CCEUR 235

Masters, whose great brown coat filled the whole
side of the bed, so that I was nowhere, looked
down at her like a worried bird. ..."

“ I'd like," she pleaded, “ to say good-bye . . .
to this gentleman, if you would kindly . . . get
out of the way for a minute. ..." And when I
bent over the wasted hand, from which the emerald-
ring now hung like a hoop, she said : “ Ah, that
defiant courtesy ! Thank you, my dear. And
good-bye for ever as ever is, for I don't suppose
I shall ever come back to England again . . .
nevermore, nevermore. And," she whispered, " I
will keep my promise. ..."

CHAPTER NINE

Talking of Hats

i

HAT was on the fifteenth afternoon of
February, as I remember well.

Now those who are sensitive to any
extreme condition of our climate will
not have forgotten that towards the
end of July of the year 1923 there was a week or
ten days when the heat in London was so
oppressive that frequent complaints were made
at the confectioners and Soda Fountains on the
ground that their ices were warm : nor were the
nights less uncomfortable — " uncomfortable,” that
is, to quote from a gentleman who wrote to The
Times about it, "in a country so unprepared for
any extreme of temperature that, if I do not seem
too fanciful, on a cold winter's day there is
nothing warm but the drinking-water and on a
hot summer’s day nothing cool but the sun." Of
course he did seem too fanciful, but, however that
may be, the nights were certainly stifling, and one
in particular I remember very well.

It was towards eleven o’clock, and Hilary, Guy
and I, having sat long over dinner upstairs at the
Caf6 Royal, were returning towards our homes
down Piccadilly, walking as slowly as we might
for the prodigious heat. We had, however, barely
touched the corner of Saint James's Street when

TALKING OF HATS

237

Guy ceased even to pretend that he was walking,
and said : " Just a moment, will you, while I go
into White's to see if Napier's there, to remind
him about dinner to-morrow night." But Guy
never in his life looked less like running, and Hilary
said : " The idea of eating in this weather ! Hm.
And what is this party, Guv?"

" Children's party," said Guy, whoso frozen
blue eyes might conceivably have made one feel
cool had one only been tall enough to be able to
look into them . . . and just at that moment,
as Guy turned away, and the three of us facing
down towards the Palace, Napier came swiftly
down the steps of White's, about ten yards down.
At the curb a taxi was waiting, its door swung
open.

"Naps! Napier!" Guy called, thinking to
catch him with as little exertion as possible in that
stifling heat. But Napier, swift as a shadow, that
greyhound of a Napier, was already in the taxi,
the door was slammed-to, and round it swept by
the Devonshire Club to turn northwards up the
slope to Piccadilly.

" Drat the boy I" said Guy, as we made to cross
the road. " Catch him on the rebound as we
cross. ..." But when, as the three of us stood
by the island under the arc-lamp, the taxi rushed
past us with screaming gears, he made no effort to
hail Napier.

"Well?" Hilary grunted, as the taxi tore up
Albemarle Street.

" Oh, ring him up," said Guy shortly, and in
silence we walked towards Hyde Park Comer.

I only knew from Guy's look that he had seen
her in the light that fell through the open window
of the passing cab. She had seemed to be in a

THE GREEN HAT

238

black dress and her head wrapped in a tight silver
turban, and I had almost gasped not only with
the surprise of seeing her at all, but the small face
in that second of light had seemed so dazzling.
“ Naturally/' I thought. 0 She's happy. ..."

Hilary hadn't, of course, seen her, for he was
always at his most thoughtful when crossing the
street. Nor had those two in the cab seen us, I
was certain : they were talking too eagerly. Guy,
Hilary and I walked on in silence, as slowly as we
might for the heat. Maybe, I thought, Guy did
not know I had seen her. As for himself, he
never gave away gratuitous information about
other people. And Guy loved Napier like his
younger brother.

We were passing by the great gates of Devon-
shire House that now more becomingly adorn the
Green Park when Hilary muttered "Bed-time"
and left us, crossing towards Half-Moon Street.
I found myself walking on with Guy, despite
the economy in walking I might have made by
going with Hilary, for my flat also lay in that
direction. But I might cut up Down Street. Guy
said, as though for some minutes past he had been
giving his whole mind to the matter : “ Not bad
weather, really, if one was dressed for it. ..."

"If 1" I said.

" Of course," said Guy, " these infernal stiff
shirts. ..."

" Quite," I said.

" Although," said Guy, “ I think they're cooler
than those sickening soft things. ..."

" I'm wearing one," I said.

" I said what I said," said Guy.

Once upon a time, as he had stood at the foot
of her bed in a dim room, Iris had called him by a

TALKING OF HATS

239

name that was not his name. " But Guy would
defend a secret not only against the angels of God
but also against himself." Yes, Iris, yes . . .
but was it necessary, Iris, to remind him of it?
For Napier was Guy de Travest's friend, and as
dear to him as a younger brother.

" To swim,” Guy murmured from deep reflec-
tion, " would be very pleasant just now. Very
pleasant indeed."

"Yes. But where? I'm not for the Loyalty,
in water debauched by face-powder. ..."

“ I thought," Guy murmured, “ that I would
swim at the Bath Club this afternoon. I get ideas,
quick as you like. But everyone else had also
been thinking on the same lines, so you can
imagine the crowd. A man there told me that
the best way to get in was to pick on the fattest
man in the water and as he came out slip into the
hole he'd made. But I couldn't even see the
water. ..."

Tall as a tree, his hat swinging lazily in his hand
near his thigh, he lounged on. . . .

“ Sickening," he murmured.

Bus after bus, laden with the people from the
theatres, thundered past us and up and down
the switchback, embracing us with waves of heat
so that one’s very skin felt like a sticky gar-
ment. . . .

" Yes," I said.

" London's all right," said Guy thoughtfully,
" as London. ..."

“Of course," I said, “as London. ..."

The wide sweep of Hyde Park Comer lay ahead
of us like a bright handkerchief in the night. The
buses trumpeted across it and around it and down
it and up it, but one and all looked as snails beside

240

THE GREEN HAT

Bus No. 16, which is beyond compare the fastest
bus in London, making the voj^age from Grosvenor
Place to Hamilton Place and back again at a speed
to astonish the eye of man.

The din that night makes in closing its doors on
London was as though muted by the still, stifling
air, and I envied the lofty calm of the Duke of
Wellington where he rides for ever amid his pleas-
aunce of small trees. The lights of Constitution
Hill glowed like fire-flies between the leafy valley
of the Green Park and the dark gardens of His
Majesty the King.

44 Trouble about London is,” said Guy thought-
fully, 44 that people are always expecting it to be
Paris or Rome or some other place. Always want-
ing something else, people are. . .

44 Anything,” I agreed, 44 so long as it's not
their own. . .

44 That's about it,” Guy murmured. 44 Sicken-
ing. . .

We thought about that foi a while.

44 Guy, one almost might go down to some part
of the river Near Maidenhead. Now. And
swim.”

44 Haven't been to Maidenhead,” Guy reflected
deeply, 44 well, it must be ten years. Difficult,
isn't it, to realise it's almost ten years since that
war started ? I haven't been — let me see —
not since the night that poor boy got himself
drowned. . .

44 Only an hour or so by car,” I said, 44 and
you can relive your youth.'

A smile flickered across the stem, small profile.
44 A long time to waste to relive a wasted youth.
What about a game of squash instead ? Make us
enjoy a drink. Come along.”

TALKING OF HATS

M 1

And so it came to pass that we bathed quite
differently than in the river by playing squash-
racquets by electric-light. Guy has a court in the
basement of his house, and when he beats you,
which is always, he says : " Sickening/'

" Where/' I asked, when we had bathed suffi-
ciently and were enjoying long tumblers of the
stuff that such good jokes are made from, whilst
from upstairs came the faint notes of a piano and
a thing they call a saxophone, for Lady de Travest
was " throwing " a small party; ‘'where are we
dining to-morrow night? And, now I come to
think of it, why this sudden children's party?"

Guy had happened on Venice playing tennis
the other day, when she had said she was feeling
perhaps a little depressed. " The heat," she had
said. . . .

" Whereupon," said Guy, imitating Cherry-
Marvel, " it came to me as not a bad idea if we
had a party for the child. Real good girl, Venice.
Hope that young man of mine will find someone
only half so good. . .

“ Yes," I said.

“ Be a sort of family party, I thought. Hugo
and Shirley, Napier and Venice, some clean and
wholesome young woman I'll find for you, while I,
thank the Lord, will be odd man out. But as to
where we should dine . .

“ In this heat. . .

" God, yes, too hot for dancing. Just listen
to them upstairs 1 Even the ceiling's sweating. . ."

The faint, slow lilt of the tango, pleasantest of
all dances but one that is so seldom danced in
London because nobody in London can dance it,
which seems a pity. . . .

“ Might almost dine here," Guy murmured,

242

THE GREEN HAT

“ if Moira doesn't want the place. And we might,
now you've suggested it, and if it's still so hot,
go and bathe somewhere afterwards instead of
sitting up in some stuffy place till all hours. See
how we feel about it, and if Venice would enjoy
that. . .

” Imagine Venice not enjoying that I”

” Well, well see,” said Guy, but more seriously
now. “ If we do, it will mean no cocktails before
dinner, no more than a glass of wine apiece over
dinner, and not a thimbleful after. I'm not going
to have that river play any more tricks on my
friends, I can tell you.”

“ And decency, Guy, will be more than served,
for there's no moon and the nights are pitch-
black. . . ”

" That's right,” said Guy thoughtfully, and
then, as he saw me to the door, he said thought-
fully : " By the way, you any idea if Venice has
ever met Iris?”

" I don't think so,” I said. “ But I'm not
sure. . .

There is never any harm in saying one isn't
sure. One should never be sure, conversationally.

u I just had an idea,” Guy murmured, looking
out over the heavy trees of the great square, " that
Iris might conceivably be passing through London,
as I heard from Eve Chalice to-day that old Port-
airley was lying near death. The last Portairley,
dear, dear.”

" Gerald won't be sorry to have missed his
turn, I've no doubt.”

“ Poor young devil I But what I was thinking
of was, just in case Iris is in London, that we
might get her for the third woman to-morrow
night . ,

TALKING OF HATS

243

" Oh/' I said. " I see. . .

"You'd quite like that, wouldn't you?"

“ Oh, I'd like it f "

" Just had an idea," Guy murmured vaguely,
“ that she and Venice might meet, if they haven't
already met, and see how they like each other.
That is, if Iris is in London. Different types . . .
you never know. Tell Iris, if by any chance you
hear anything of her to-morrow. My idea, tell
her. . . ."

“ All right, if she should give me a ring. Good-
night, Guy."

" Good-night, boy. Sorry about the squash.
Sickening. My idea, tell her."

As I looked back from that wide comer of
Belgrave Square which sweeps suavely up to
Hyde Park Corner, I could see the very tall figure
of the friend of his friends still framed against the
lighted doorway. Across the four open windows
above him figures passed slowly.

But what, what in the world, could suddenly
have happened to Iris, she whom I had last seen,
whom I had last heard, saying she would never-
more return to England, promising . . .? And
one realised, in wondering that with so deep a
bewilderment, how very literally one would take
Iris's word, how completely one had believed in
her promise, as one would have believed in any
promise made by that Iris March who, as Hilary
had reluctantly to confess, did not lie. But now
. . . nevermore, nevermore 1

And as I let myself into my flat, I found myself
picturing Guy de Travest and Iris face to face in a
place where no people were, Guy and Iris com-
pletely alone with each other and God. And it
was Guy whom I heard speaking, Guy's low cold

244

THE GREEN HAT

voice telling Iris of certain things, how he had
been shocked that dim morning to hear her whisper
a name like a kiss, a name that was already pledged
to another, and how, when he had long since
forgotten her whispering of that name, he had
chanced on a night to see her no further than
the span of that name apart from him who bore
it, and how he couldn't but think that she was
committing the one unpardonable crime of stealing
a man from his wife, like a mean little thief in the
night. And I could imagine Iris in her tight silver
turban, like a star it would be in that lonely place
where she faced Guy, and her tiger-tawny curls
dancing formally on each small cheek, and all
about her that dazzling brilliance which will sud-
denly enwrap a very fair woman in a black dress,
whilst the blood would be clean emptied from
her small grave face as she listened to the judg-
ment of the slender giant with the cold eyes and
the quiet, so quiet, savage voice. They were of
the same people, Guy and Iris, of the same blood,
of the same landscape, and you couldn't help but
wonder how she would face his judgment, she
who had for so long outlawed herself, she who so
profoundly impressed you as not caring the tremor
of an eyelash for the laws of her fathers. Would
she, faced by the warrior of conduct, still not care,
or would she be ashamed and afraid, would she be
as though seeing England, her England, the very
soil of her England, turning from her in contempt ?
I simply could not tell what she would feel, so little
did I know of the nature of that shameless, shameful
lady. And that was again the thought that came
to me the very next night to the one I am telling of,
whilst I sat beside her in her car, and we in the
van of the children's party's raid on the river. A

TALKING OF HATS

245

torment of heat lay over England that July night,
but that is not why we who sped through the
countryside will remember it.

She was driving, and when I dropped a word
into the silence of our drive, for Iris and I were at
enmity now — for Venice ! — a curious smile seemed
to devour the white profile, to devour it quite : a
very witch of a smile that was, I thought, and
more than adequate to meet my word, for the
word I had dropped was what the raven quoth :
" Nevermore I"

But as she smiled so, she drove that menacing
bonnet ever more furiously along the road to
Maidenhead, so that corners perished like midgets
before our head -lights and Hugo and Shirley, who
sat behind, murmured against her driving, saying
that it would be bad for their reputation as a
happily-married couple to be found dead on the
road to Maidenhead. “ A friend of mine,” yelled
Hugo, “ was asked to resign from Buck’s for being
found dead on the Maidenhead road. ...”

But Iris diove faster and ever faster, and sud-
denly I realised that the rare devouring smile that
was like my enemy on her face was new to me who
had never before seen Iris smile happily.

246

THE GREEN HAT

2

I have gone too far ahead in the tale of the last
March, letting myself be beguiled from a narra-
tor’s duties by the reckless flight of the silver stork
through the quiet countryside. But from the
night of the children’s party I can only go back
by saying that she was wearing that night not her
silver turban but a green hat, yea, a green hat, of a
sort of felt, and bravely worn ; and who but I had
bought that green hat for her that very day, she
having said to me after luncheon that she needed a
green hat pour le sport . I understood that the sport
would be under even warmer skies than ours, for
in three days’ time, she said, she would be on
board ship for Rio di Janeiro, and she did not
need to tell me that she would not be voyaging
unaccompanied. That was a fell lady for whom I
bought a green hat that day.

Nothing easier than a green hat, it appears,
can well be bought. Like a flash of summer light-
ning, that is how a green hat is bought. Says the
lady to the shop : “ Greeting, sir. I will have a
green hat pour le sport , similar in every way to the
green hats 1 have bought here every year since
the death of Dr. Crippen.”

“ Very good, madam. That will be so much,
madam. On your account, madam?”

“ Oh, no 1 My friend will pay. Farewell.”

We spoke very little over the luncheon we took
together. It was a stifling day, and what, anyhow,
was there to say ? Very far from my business was
it to speak of broken promises unless spoken to,
and very far from her thoughts did any question
of broken promises seem. Oh, but that was a fell

TALKING OF HATS

247

lady who luncheoned with me on that sweltering
day !

We sat picking at green olives and salads and
bits of toast, we drank those long iced drinks full
of vegetable matter which, apparently, one must
drink so that one may feel the heat more poignantly
than before, we had nothing in particular to say.
Early that morning she had rung me up, a calm,
happy voice, demanding from me not the smallest
expression of surprise at her presence in London ;
although, of course, one did make a show of being
surprised, for she couldn't possibly know that I
had seen her in that cab, and, I thought, she never
would know. The Marches would be let off that,
anyhow.

But Iris, over that luncheon, did not appear to
remark that I had nothing in particular to say.
And, what with the heat and with that, I suppose
I grew more and more annoyed, for there isn *t, I
suppose, anything in the world more irritating than
to be angry with a woman and she not notice it at
all. Of course many women will appear not to
notice it, but you can see that that is put on ; but
this Iris just, I'll swear it, did not notice anything.

Nor, I thought, did she have a very healthy
appetite for one not long since recovered from a
serious illness, the way she picked at bits of things
here and there; but she excused herself to Charles,
who came up to protest against the dishonour she
did his food, on the ground that she never did eat
with her meals.

And then there was a moment when I asked, from
a large silence which seemed to her maddeningly
natural, I just asked paternally, since it is always
easier to be paternal than to be fraternal : " Happy,
Iris ? ”

THE GREEN HAT

248

She as buttering a piece of toast Melba about
half an inch square. My question stayed her
knife. She stared intently towards the doors of
the restaurant for a long second, and then she
said, frankly, gravely, calmly, not at all intensely
but with unutterable conviction : 4(4 Unbearably/'
Then she went on buttering her piece of toast Melba ,
and I could do what 1 liked about it.

Now 1 must say this lor the Iris who sat with
her profile to me that day, that she was a more
lovely Iris even than the one 1 had known. But as
to how she w f as more lovely, that I do not know ;
nor, if 1 knew, could I describe it but by using the
word “ ethereal," to be immediately followed by the
word “ unearthly," for it i a convention not to
be broken lightly that a woman who has not long
since recovered from a long illness must look
"ethereal" and “unearthly." But she didn't, I
think, look either of those two things. She
seemed, I mean to say, mote lovely than ever just
because she was more earthy. She looked, I fancy
I mean, in love — her skin, that is to say, looked as
though she who wore it was in love. Yes, her skin
did. I fancy it must have been that. A beautiful
woman in love and loved seems, in however un-
aware a moment, to glow with an earthy beauty.
When writers say that ** Gloria was looking very
spiritual that morning " what they really mean
— of course, this is all theory — is that Gloria was
looking more earthy that morning, that in her
eyes there was the afterglow of love's delight.
A beautiful woman neglected or unloved appeals,
of course, more to the chivalrous sense in men,
for men will stand more of a chance of a sad woman
being interested in them ; but the very skin of a
woman who is coiled in love seems to have a

TALKING OF HATS 249

jewel-like quality, and her mind is like a tempta-
tion one wants to touch.

“ And/' I said, fascinated for some reason by
the faint, faint golden down on her arm, “ you're
quite well and strong now?"

“ Of course," she said, " not so strong as all
that. But strong enough. ..."

“ Oh, dear ! Strong enough for what. Iris?"

" Everything," she said, shrouding a boiled
cherry in whipped cream. “ Must get fat," she
explained as an afterthought.

Now there were two red camellias painted on
the left side of the crown of her hat — women at
that time didn't wear bowler hats, or, as they
prefer to call them, cloche hats — which was of
the same colour as the sun, of straw, and with
a narrow stiff brim. The two red camellias looked
just as waxen and artificial as two real red camellias
would look, and so it must have cost a power of
money, that hat. She would have flown like the
wind to Reboux in Paris, saying to herself : “ I am
in love. I must have a hat," and so she had
bought that hat. As for her dress that stifling
day, you would have called it blue if you hadn't
seen that no colour made by hands could compare
with the blue of those grave eyes, and it was of
that fine texture which is finer than the texture of
silk of China, if such a thing can be, and here
and there upon its lower parts were worked
large white arabesques in what looked to an
uninformed eye like wool, but surely it could not
be the fleece of the lamb that Iris was wearing
that day?

“ And did Guy," she asked, “ say anything
when you three saw me in that cab last night?"

"Oh 1" I said.

250

THE GREEN HAT

She had very suddenly turned to me, so that at
last I must look full into the eyes that blazed so
incredibly blue from the shadow of the yellow
hat . . . and I, I could not meet those eyes 1
I stared instead at the emerald on the third finger
of her right hand, and how white and frail that
hand looked, so weak, so frail, when you thought
of it as belonging to those deep, compelling, un-
scrupulous eyes.

“Well?" It was her voice, faint, slightly
husky; yet it rose above the roar of London and
was lost in the clouds that pass over a strange,
unknown land.

“ Personally," I said, “ 1 liked your silver turban
very much."

“ Dear, that was not a turban ! "

99 Turban is a pretty word, Iris. And suitable,
too. ..."

“ Turkey, polygamy? "

“ Just a boyish fancy."

“And Guy? You haven't told me?"

99 But, Iris, he never, as you know, gives away
gratuitous information. He just asked me to ask
you to dine to-night, as I have done. ' My idea,
tell her/ he said. In fact, he repeated that. And
you're coming?"

“ Why, of course ! " she said absently, so ab-
sently.

“ But why do you ask about Guy, Iris? I
fancied you didn't care what anyone thought."

Throughout that passage her face had been
turned to mine, but only now could I muster the
courage to raise my eyes from the third finger of
her right hand, to see that her face was as though
turned to a mask of white stone with two ame-
thysts for eyes. It was a mask, that face, and

TALKING OF HATS

251

those were the eyes of a mask. Yet it was tar
from a mask of concealment, it was the mask of
herself, of her very self, of the self that was, in
some remote part of her being, really herself. And
again I couldn't help thinking of her as of some-
one who had strayed into our world from a strange
land unknown to us, a land where lived a race
of men and women who were calmly awaiting their
inheritance of our world when we should have an-
nihilated one another in our endless squabbles about
honour, morality, nationality. Strong were the
people of that land, stronger than the gold they
despised but used, deterred by not qualm nor fear,
strong and undefeatable. And just like that was the
white mask of this beautiful woman, strong and
undefeatable. It knew not truth nor lying, not
honour nor dishonour, not loyalty nor treachery,
not good nor evil : it was profoundly itself, a mask
of the morning of this world when men needed
not to confuse their minds with laws with which
to confuse their neighbours, a mask of the evening
of this world when men shall have at last made
passions their servants and can enter mto their
full inheritance. . . .

“ I don't," she said at last from a remote dis-
tance, the amethysts absorbed in the air between
us. “ I don't." And then she smiled faintly, but
even so much was enough to change the amethysts
into eyes. “ I don't," she said very huskily.
" But I just asked. . . ."

“ Iris, I said, my mind charged with that mask,
“ you have us all at a great disadvantage. . . ."

Slowly, thoughtfully, she made a circle of air
with a small golden tube that had a crimson
tongue, and then she passed the golden tube
through the circle's heart. She was thinking.

CHAPTEK TEN

The Full of the Emerald

T

S I think ol that wretched night of the
< hiklren’s party theie will be two pictures
that cross mv mind. The first, of a
group of brightly coloured people, for
we were in white flannels and the women
in those mad, barbaric colours which fashion,
goaded on by Chanel and gallantly led by Captain
Molyneux, has lately dung as a challenge to our
dark civilisation, aiound a table lit by the cameo
flames rising from eight tall cast candlesticks
by Paul Lamarie; and I remember that in the
still air of Guy’s great, laic ui uug-room those
cameo flames never flickered even so much, they
might have been flowers of light cut out of the
stifling heat.

The second picture is of a darkness. A darkness
torn hoie and there by the sudden flame of a
match which drove the stars trembling back into
the invisible and joined to groping eyes the silky
soft blackness of the water. The black night
pinned round the world with stars, shouts, laughter,
splashings, an empty boat, silence, shrieks, a whis-
per from the black face of the water, and so home.
Total losses : one stocking and one emerald.
** I’m so glad, so glad,” she whispered, just before

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 253

going to sleep against my shoulder, for it was
Hugo Cypress who was riding the stork home-
ward.

But I have said that whilst we were on our
way riverwards, and I sitting beside Iris as she
hurled us headlong through the still night, we
stood at enmity, she and I — for Venice ! And
yet, so far as I could make out, there was not a
soul but myself out of that party, Guy, Napier,
Venice, Hugo, Shirley, Iris, who seemed in the
least degree uncomfortable. Those people had
been, throughout dinner and afterwards, com-
pletely and supremely normal. For all you knew,
I mean, they might have been having fun.
There weren't any undercurrents. Not even
what you would call any undercurrents. Those
people were quite calmly themselves, they
just behaved as themselves in that confoundedly
unassailable way which is peculiar to the people
of this small island : as though, to be sure,
they weren't giving away anything of a personal
nature even to themselves. You can't help
seeing why Napoleon found these people so
detestable.

And it was all, you couldn't help feeling, so
mean, such a humbug of a thing. I suppose, of
course, that I was the only one besides Iris and
Napier who knew * of their departure together in
three days' time./ “ I have always wanted," she
had said to me, *“ to go to Rio, and then across
the continent* One can't talk in Europe, it's got
so stuffy nop. But I always thought I would keep
the Americas until my fate should be fulfilled."
Yet, I wits quite certain, everyone at the table
must have known that something was wrong, else
why was that fell, beautiful lady there at all?

254

THE GREEN HAT

For Guy, in the ordinary way, wouldn't, it simply
wasn't in Guy's nature to be able to, ask Iris Storm
to the same dinner with the yoimg wives of his
two young friends, his prot6°4s almost, Napier and
Hugo. And if he had asked Iris to-night, knowing
that she wouldn't funk coming — though the real
reason why she had come was that Iris simply did
not attach any importance to such things, “ and
besides," she had said, “ I want to see dear Hugo
again, and as a married man " — it was just because
he wanted Iris to realise the scene on which she
was intruding so wickedly. It is such catholic
cruelty as Guy's that, by always lopping off the
rotten limb, has kept the heritage of so many
English houses almost, despite the common talk
of the day, unimpaired. To-night he was wanting
Iris to see that her old friends, her old playmates,
Hugo and Napier, had grown up differently from
her — better or worse, that wasn't Guy's point, but
differently — that while she had lived according to
her nature they had lived according to their
country, they and their young wives, Shirley and
Venice. Not the most prejudiced eye, Guy knew,
could but see that they made a fine, harmonious,
clean four. Youth was there, and simplicity, and
friendship, and love, too. And Guy had dared
Iris to come to the children's party merely to say
to her, with her eyes : “ See, Iris, here are four
people, two by two, happily paired, friends and
lovers, husbands and wives. See, Iris, and let them
be. One of these men you may be able to intro-
duce to the magic mysteries of love more completely
than his young wife ever can. But see. Iris,
how much you deprive him of, how utterly you
deprive her I You have put yourself outside
this long ago, you never can be of this again. See,

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 253

Iris, how happy they are, and young, and clean,
and earnest to do right : most earnest to do right,
Iris, despite the most damnable enchantments.
And as they are so you might have been with
Boy Fenwick, but you chose differently. Iris
March, the death of Boy Fenwick puts you out
of court. See, Iris, and for God's sake let these
children be ! ”

But that catholic Guy had not seen that beauti-
ful white mask between the tawny formal curls
and the two amethysts for eyes. I have told
him since that had he seen that mask he
would have foreseen the little profit he might ex-
pect to derive for his friends from Iris's presence
at that dinner. I have told him how it was in
my mind that night that nothing could move
Iris, because it was as though in winning
Napier she was winning the thirty years' war of
her life. The shameless lady had at last lopped
off the limb that was called the shameful lady ;
and so she had come again out of the darkness
to Napier, she had come again as the enchanted
voice whispering of better dreams, and not all
Guy's Englishry could hold Napier now from
following that enchanted whisper across the seas,
that Iris March might at last come to fulfil her
fate.

And yet, by the perfection of their normality
over dinner, it might have been this person, me,
who was being treacherous to his friends by fancy-
ing disloyalties among them I Shirley, for instance.
Shirley, little sister to George Tarlyon, was of the
same age as Venice, they had been at Heathfield
together, they had always been together, and
where Venice led there Shirley followed, and what
Venice saw that Shirley saw, and where Venice

THE GREEN HAT

256

raged there Shirley raged. And Venice was raging
now. Oh, she must be raging frantically ! Yet
Shirley never once, as they say, " let on” about
her state of mind. She was just Shirley all the
time, sweet in a small way, sarcastic in a large way,
Shirley of the brown eyes and unbreakable spirit,
pretty Shirley. Maybe she was behaving a little
better than was her general wont, for Shirley
was so well-bred that she never practised what
you would call deportment, but that was the
only way the strain of that evening seemed to
affect her. . . .

Exactly at what point, one wondered that even-
ing, did behaviour become hypocrisy? For in-
stance, Guy. There he sat, that knight of old
beliefs, at our head, very gay in white flannels
and a brilliant Fair Isle sweater, for all the world
as though it was not already stifling enough, for
all the world as though two people at his table
hadn't offended him on the one essential point of
conduct by which Guy de Travest knew friends
from strangers : never to give way to what you
want to do, if honour tells you that you may not
do it.

And Napier, that love-lost man I Love-lost,
that man? Let me tell of a moment after dinner
when Venice suddenly, tremendously, helplessly,
cried to Iris : “ Oh, dear Jesu, aren't you lovely !”
And Napier, at that moment gaiety itself, came
suddenly between them, an arm round each of
their shoulders. ” Why, of course she is, Venice 1
I tell you, I was particular about my friends
when I was young. ...” It wasn't, of course,
voluntary, he was not thinking, Napier couldn't
think and then be a hypocrite : it was just the
natural, normal sort 01 nonsense that happens.

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 257

He had, at that moment, forgotten what he
would have to tell Venice, to-morrow or the
day after, of the love-philtre. And the child
Venice ! Venice, that very queen of hypocrites !
Charming she was to Iris, just the tiniest bit
deferential, as a girl of one-and-twenty might
well be, but seldom is, to a woman of thirty.
And yet Venice, ever since that afternoon in
Paris, had been, I knew, eating her heart fret-
ting about Napier, fearful and jealous and
racked by what she could not see of his heart,
tremulous with terror and suspicion of that legend-
ary playmate, that Iris March of long ago. And
how she hated the idea of Iris, I knew well, how
she hated the thing she thought Iris was — and
wasn't Iris just that ! — with all the uncompromising
savagery of her heart ! Venice, Oh Venice ! And
once, over dinner, she whispered to me : " I like
Mrs. Storm/'

I don't know, of course, but I suppose that in
saying nothing one said quite enough to that.

“ I do really," Venice insisted, but not with
enough vehemence for one to be able to fix on
that as evidence of her insincerity. “ She gives
you a sense of . . . well, completeness, if you
see what I mean?"

“ Oh, quite," I said. “ Completeness, cer-
tainly. ..."

“ Not like Shirley and me, you see," she said
thoughtfully.

“ Yes, I can just see that, Venice."

“ Mrs. Storm," said Venice gravely, “ gives one
a sense of being a lady from herself, in her own
right, if you see what I mean. Whereas Shirley
and me "

" Shirley and I."

THE GREEN HAT

258

“ Shirley and I, dear, and nearly everyone we
know are ladies just because our mothers were,
and that kind of thing. I'd trust Mrs.
Storm. . .

And so I was to tell Iris that Venice trusted
her I And then, according to the Scriptures as
written by Venice, Iris would feel such a cad
that she wouldn't after all, be able to bring
herself to steal away her husband. She would
repent. Iris would, on being told that Venice
trusted her, and she would go back again into
the nasty darkness of outlawry, leaving decent
people to the safe enjoyment of their husbands.
Dear Venice, I am afraid my telling Iris that
wouldn't have quite that effect, she just wouldn't
notice, Venice, that I had spoken; for such a plot
might do exceeding well in a novel, whence you
have no doubt derived it, but in life, Venice, your
Iris March isn't to be deterred from her chase of
the Blue Bird by being trusted. If only life was a
movie, Venice, you would only have to let Iris know
that you trusted her, and away she would slink,
weeping.

But imagine that Venice, an eagle in her eyrie,
desperately beating her wings to hide the sun
from the eyes of her mate I Oh, but Venice acted
superbly ! Not, of course, that there wasn't
provided a very handsome peg on which to hang
the acting. The bathing idea came as a boon
and a blessing to all the company. You could
talk about an idea like that, and no harm
done. Guy chivalrously gave me the credit for
it, and I was acclaimed by Shirley and Venice
as something they have in America called, so
Venice swore on oath, a “he-man." But Shirley
thought it was very silly of Guy to go and

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 259

spoil the whole picnic by insisting on bathing-
costumes. Shirley thought that at length. So
did Venice.

" I mean, on a hearty picnic like this ! " said
Shirley helplessly. And Venice said it was absurd
to go digging about among bathing-costumes on
a nice, warm, pitch-black night. One's chemise,
said Shirley, would do ever so well. One's chemise,
said Venice, had done very well before. And one
wouldn't, said Shirley indignantly, really need
the chemise afterwards, just to come home with.
Not in this heat, said Venice, and they appealed
to Iris, but Iris protested that she must be neutral,
because she was not going to bathe; but she would
have thought, she said, that a dry shift was always
preferable, when possible.

“ Not going to bathe ! " cried Venice. " Not
going to — Oh, you must bathe ! Of course
you're going to bathe I Oi, you'll spoil the whole
party ! "

It was after dinner, and Hugo was doing a few
card-tricks with champagne-glasses, the idea being,
Hugo said, to settle our digestions after one of
the best dinners that had ever left him with an
appetite.

" Of course she'll bathe!" said Hugo. "I've
known the girl all my life, and I'll answer for
her. She'll bathe. Leave her to me. Silly, not
bathing."

“ She's rather common, your friend," Shirley
sighed to Guy.

" Sickening. Can't not bathe, really, on a night
like this."

" Seems to me," Napier scowled, " that she will
have to bathe. Tell me if I'm wrong. What?"

" Listen," Iris pleaded.

260

THE GREEN HAT

" Coming here/' said Shirley indignantly, " and
not bathing ! "

" I am terrified/' said Iris desperately. " Terri-
fied of masses of water. Once, in the Black Sea of
all places, I got cramp, and ever since ..."

" If you only knew/' sighed Hugo, “ how cold
all that leaves us ! You'll swim, girl. Good for
you. Make your coat shine. Give you back your
lost youth."

" Hugo, don't be so tactless ! " cried Shirley.

“ The girl's right," Guy closed the discus-
sion. “ She's only been out of bed about a
month. ..."

" But I haven't been near mine for longer
than thatl" cried Shirley inevitably, and it
was just at that moment, under cover of it, that
I touched the ice-cold hand. That was the
only sign until we reached the river that
Venice's married life had tumbled like a house
of cards about her heart, that and her " trusting"
Iris.

Venice was saying : “ And didn't we just have
some trouble with you, Mrs. Storm, when you were
ill in Pans ! Naps white in the face thinking
you were going to die, me green in the face think-
ing my holiday would be spoilt if you did, this
he-man here purple in the face telling me to be
reasonable. . . ."

" But you were in bed for ages, weren't you ? "
said Shirley sympathetically. "What was it?
Some foul plague ? "

" Ptomaine poisoning," said Napier, and as I
was giving Venice a light with which to torture
yet another cigarette my hand happened to touch
hers. " In this heat ! " said I.

" Shut up, you fool I " she whispered desperately.

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 261

and then she tried not to smile frantically, whis-
pering : " Darling, darling, darling I My one

friend. ...”

“ Venice, they’re never any real good, friends.
They can’t do anything. . . .”

“ I know. Oh, I know. Oh God, I know ! . . .
Mrs. Storm, what a divine lip -stick 1 May I see ?
May I use ? ”

Baby.

262

THE GREEN HAT

2

Thus, the children's party. . „ .

Their engines no louder than a whisper through
the quiet noises of the night, and swift as arrows
with flaming eyes, two touring-cars, a primrose
and a blue, passed through the villages river-
wards. The good people slept on undisturbed, as
why should they not, for a motor-car will disturb
the amenities of a village by night less than a
w’heel-barrow. Maybe through the crack ol a
blind flashed a startling light on a sleepless pillow.
Maybe a distant scream, as of a great sea-bird,
stirred a boy to dream of vain, polite, perishable
delights. Maybe a cow stared thoughtfully at
the strange, swift, whirring insects with the livid
eyes and the cruel screams. Here and there the
lamps shone on the buttons of a policeman, stock-
still in a doorway. There was no air but the wind
of our passage, warm, heavy with dust and dry
grasses. u Rain, rain ! " breathed England in her
sleep. And there was no rain, nor breath of rain,
nor yet that damp, oppressive foretaste of a
thunderstorm to come, only a torment of heat
over the land and around the land the unclouded
darkness pinned with faint stars. A myriad flies
withstood the stork, were appalled, died. Wrapped
in silence, armed with light, we fled beneath the
suns of the night like battle-chariots rushing to
the assault of the stronghold of the gods. Iris
had gone mad.

I thought of Mr. Polly disturbed in his sleep,
twenty years ago, on a Sussex hay-rick by the
roar of a racing-car. Mr. Polly could have slept
undisturbed for us. One hundred and twenty

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 263

horses drew us, shadows of nothing from nothing
to nothing beneath the impersonal stare of the
stars. Look away from the stars, lovers of the
world’s delights, for they are the destroyers of the
world’s delights with their dreams of grander
things. To listen to great music, to adore God in
vast solitudes, to kneel before the face of beauty,
to pass through the quiet land like an arrow with
flaming eyes, swifter than your thoughts : such
and the like, according to each our nature, are
the captains of the world’s delights, so keep your
eyes from the stars, that destroy our delights
with their dreams of grander things.

Silence marches with the thoughts in your
mind. Maybe a word or two will drop, hesitate
in the wind, fight with the dying hosts of midgets,
perish on the road. Small flying things brush by
your face, and a dry unsweet scent, as though
England is sleeping with her windows closed.

The green hat was somewhere beside me, it fell
and rolled about my feet, she murmured : " Leave
it." To the warm wind fell the honour of the
dance, and with the tawny cornstalks the wind
stepped a wide-flung dance. Why does your hair
dance so, Iris March, like a halo possessed of
devils? Why this, why that, Iris March?

In the glass of the wind-screen we might now
and then see the faint reflection of Guy’s lamps
behind us. Nay, once or twice his bonnet nosed
up beside Iris, just beside her elbow. But the
stork cried hoarsely, flew on.

Again, silent as the rustle of a woman’s dress walk-
ing in a dark garden, Guy’s shining bonnet menaced
the tail of our eye, and Guy himself, alone in
front, yellow-haired, grim, fair herald of a fighting
pageant in his brilliant Fair Isle sweater, and

THE GREEN HAT

264

now the face of Venice, leaning foiward to Guy’s
shoulder, excited, exhorting. Venice, for Venice !
She woiild pass the lady of ihe dancing hair, would
Venice. But the stork cried hoarsely, flew on.

We wrestled. Silent as phantoms, we wrestled.
One hundred and twenty horses, a winged Mercury
and a stork wrestled for the dominion of nothing
on the Reading road.

There was a corner, proud and saturnine from
many fell triumphs. The stork screamed a taunt,
flew on.

“Ho!” gasped Hugo, chattering, from behind.
“ Steady, girl ! Shirley’s frightened. . . .”

“ Let him pass. Iris !” cried I. A little scared,
a woman driving, you never know, might lose
her head, boy’s head, curly head, white and tiger-
tawny, but too white, too intent, too infernally
reckless. . . .

“Iris, Iris!”

“ Can do seventy-five, if you like,” cried the
bps of the dancing hair.

“ Let him pass, Iris ! ”

“ Pass? Am I mad ! As soon let happiness
pass! See, the stars are laughing. . .

“Iris, Iris!”

“ Let him pass, Iris ! Damn you, it won't hold
the road 1 ”

“ Why, the road’s fainting with joy ! Can do
seventy-six if you like. But not more. . .

A new road, recently laid down to soften the
passage of footlight-favourites to the reaches of
Taplow and Maidenhead, wide, deserted of houses.
Meadows swept each side into the desert darkness.
Iris, perhaps remembering Mr. Polly, perhaps
thinking Mr. Polly had slept long enough, kicked
open the exhaust. That lends another mile an

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 265

hour to speed. Another sixty horses gave answer
behind, then fell snarling back towards London.
“ Seventy-one, Iris ! ”

“ Ow !” she breathed. “ Accelerator burning
foot. Ow! Hell!”

“ Maidenhead ! ” screamed Shirley.

" To the right. Iris ! ”

And so we came into the yard of Quindle's.
Still, sleeping, shuttered, Quindle's hostelry was a
rebuke to the flaming lights which made a festival
of the desert scene. Then Guy's car swung in,
poor winged Mercury. Shows one, don't you know,
how much gods are worth. . . .

“ Sickening, Iris. You had me properly beat
that time.”

“ But how my foot burns, Guy ! ”

“ Look ! ” said Venice. “ Hist ! ”

A man in shirt-sleeves was come out of the
hotel. He stared at us, rubbed his eyes, stared
at us.

" Ho !” called Major Cypress. " Ho, there ! Is
that Quindle's speaking?”

The man in shirt-sleeves came through the
flame of the lamps. An amiable man, he looked.

“ Now remember,” whispered Shirley at large,
“ no matter how beastly they are to us, we are
going to bathe. Let everyone speak at once.
That will baffle him.”

“ Evening,” said the man in shirt-sleeves. “ Bit
late, isn't it?”

“ Not one yet,” said Hugo. “ I say, we want
to bathe.”

“ Can't have no rooms,” said the man in shirt-
sleeves. u Hotel's full.”

“ But we don't want no rooms ! ” Venice pleaded.
“ We only want to bathe. ...”

266

THE GREEN HAT

“ Bar's closed/' said the man in shirt-sleeves.

“ Serve 3^011 right/' said Hugo. “ But well
give you a drink if you want one. Here you are.
Beer or champagne?"

" I want to bathe/' Shirley pleaded.

" Can't bathe 'ere," said the man in shirt-sleeves.

“ You don't know about us," said Venice
severely. “ We can bath anywhere."

“ Against the lor, mibS."

" That will be all right about the law." A
sudden voice, a calm voice, a cold, chill murmur.
It fell from heights like a douche. The man in
shirt-sleeves tried not to have to look up all the
way to Guy's face. Too tall was Guy, in that
light. Guy smiled down at the man in shirt-
sleeves.

“ Hot night," Guy murmured. " Very hot.
My children, all these. . . ."

“ Ho," said the man in shirt-sleeves. “ 'Ot or
cold, it's against the lor, that's wot."

" Don't you worry your head about the law,"
said Guy. " But what you might do, now, would
be to get us some towels. We forgot towels. ..."

" Against the lor, an) r how," said the man in
shirt-sleeves.

“ I do wish j r ou'd say something else just once,"
snapped Shirley.

Iris, a white face, gardenia-white, mocking hair,
a barbaric scarf about her throat, her hat a splash
of black against the frail fancy that was her dress,
standing a little away, staring at the stars. "A
light," she murmured. "A light ! " Then Napier
was beside her, lighting her cigarette, lighting also
the curious, still smile on his acolyte’s face, an
enchanted smile, the smile of a man drowned in a
magic pool. The collar of his white shirt was

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 267

unbuttoned, the dark hair sleek in the glow of the
flaming lights. . . .

" Naps, give me a light too."

“ Here you are, Venice," said Hugo.

" Oh, it's gone out I Naps, a light !"

" Sorry, Venice. ..."

Guy seemed to be shaking hands with the man
in shirt-sleeves.

“ Get you some towels," said he, moving off.

Hugo whispered : " One law for the rich, one
for the poor. Dear me ! "

“ Sickening. But we may as well take advan-
tage of what's left of it. Getting a bit mouldy,
that law."

“ Come on, Hugo. God, it’s dark 1 Which way
is it? We must And a boat. . . ."

“ Naps, this way ! No, down here . . . but
hang on to my arm ! Soon find a boat. . . ."

“ You can’t have no boat !" called the man in
shirt-sleeves.

“ You get those towels," said Hugo severely.
“ The way you talk ! "

“ Please, your arm," Iris begged me, husky
voice. “ Foot hurts. And isn’t it dark 1 "

“ Here you are ! " came Venice’s clear boy’s
voice from the pit of darkness ahead, beneath us.

We faltered, blind as bats, down the slope of a
landing-stage.

0 Matches, please I " Shirley’s voice. Oh, trust
Shirley and Venice to have the affair well in hand !
The pit of darkness ahead was bitten by tiny
flames. “ Oh, look out, Naps ! Ow, God damn
you I "

“ Naps, you might wipe your feet on your own
wife, would you?"

There were uncertainties, holes, fissures of

268

THE GREEN HAT

splintered wood. The tiny flames in the pit ahead
were like lance-points thrusting the darkness
deeper into the eyes.

Iris and I marched slowly as the smoke of our
cigarettes in the breathless night. She leaned on
my arm, completely. “ Foot hurts/' I wished
she wouldn't. I almost said, “ don't." Her touch
confounded, confused. She was tangible, until
she touched you. She was finite, until she touched
you. She was a woman, until she touched you.
Then she became woman, and you water. She
became a breath of womanhood clothed in the
soft, delicious ntystery of the flesh. Touching
her, you touched all desire. She was impersonal
and infinite, like all desire. She was indifferent
to all but her desire, like all desire. She was a
breath carved in flesh, like all desire. She was
the flower of the plant of all desire. Desire is the
name of the plant that Lilith sowed, and every
now and then it puts out the flower that in the
choir of flowers is the paramour of the mandrake.

“ You are very silent, Iris. . . /'

“ Yes . . . yes? Sometimes. ... I don't
know, but it's as though the stars make me ner-
vous, sometimes. They're so hopeless. They sneer,
I can't help thinking. But are we going right ? "

The darkness ahead stirred with tiny flames
and exultant voices. Venice and Shirley !

“ I say, lovely boat I" cried Shirley.

" Where, Shirley ? " I called.

“ Between you and me," Iris whispered, “ I
wouldn’t mind sitting. Foot hurts. . . ."

u Come straight on Don’t go right or left.
River."

“ It’s not a boat at all !" cried Venice. “ It's
a lovely motor-canoe. Oh, chaps 1 "

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 269

“ Ssh !" Guy's voice.

Who cared? Not Shirley. “ And cushions!
And steering-wheel ! And everything. . .

“ Naps, this way ! Here you are ! Isn't it a
beauty? "

“ Hope no one gets drowned/' Iris whispered.

" Everyone's cold sober."

“ But weeds and cramp and things. . .

“ And currents," came Guy's murmur from
somewhere just above our heads. “ But it's safe
as houses as long as we keep in a line between this
bank and the other. Had inquiries made to-day."

“ Sensible Guy !"

" Best way to mend things is to stop them, Iris."

Our eyes pricked by the wicked little match-
lights, we could just make out at our feet the
shape of a long motor-canoe and, at one end of
it, a jumble of figures. They seemed to be fight-
ing, those figures, bent this way and that in heroic
attitudes. The canoe twisted and rocked franti-
cally on its moorings. Fierce whispers, wicked
words. . . .

“ Steady a moment," said Guy, just beside us.
But they weren't steadying any moments, Venice
and Shirley and Hugo, whilst Napier helped them
by getting in their way. They were up to some-
thing, those frantic figures.

"Steady, I said!" said Guy sharply. That
learnt them. Someone in the boat lit a match,
and the water shone like black silk. I saw
Napier's white face looking towards us, white
face, dark eyes. Love-lost, dreaming. . . .

" Now look here," said Guy gently. “ Just
leave those sickening ropes alone. You Venice,
you I "

“ But, Guy ! We must get "

270

THE GREEN HAT

" Must nothing. It's not our boat, Venice,
and I never break more than one law a night."

“ But — Oh, damn the man 1"

“ Honest to God, Venice. Now, Shirley, behave
yourself ! We'll sit in the wretched boat, but no
more. And the river just here is safe. . . ."

“ Look here," said Hugo. " What about this
for an idea? The women have one end of the
boat and we the other?"

“ And no matches to- "

“ But where's Iris?"

“ Here," came her voice, as though from the
water. "In the middle of the boat. Very com-
fortable. Many cushions. I'll take care of the
boat while you swim. . . ."

" Isn't she kind, our fast friend ! I say, no
matches to be struck until someone gives the
word ! My figure’s good, but even Reville doesn't
think it's perfect. ..."

" And better hand all your nasty bits of jewellery
and watches to Iris."

“ 'Ere's towels," said a miserable voice.

The canoe rocked beneath us. At our end soft
things dropped to our feet, got in the way. Never
was so dark and still a night. It was a relief taking
off even the white flannels.

" Any swimming to be done," said Guy, " to be
done in a straight line between this and the other
bank. First man or woman who disobeys gets a
crack on the head (a) from the bridge over there
and (b) from me."

" This wing's getting a bit crowded," sighed
Hugo. “ It's a blessing we're not French and
haven't nice warm underclothes as well."

The glow of her cigarette lit Iris's mouth and
eyes. . . .

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 271

“ I got one foot in the water,” she said at large.

“Taking the edge off our bathing!” Dear*
Hugo. . . .

“Now, wot's all this about bathing? ” said a Voice.

“ Police ! Puss, puss ! ”

“ Didn't I tell 'em ! ” panted the man in shirt-
sleeves. “ Didn't I I Told 'em it was against the
lor.”

“ Look here ! ” cried Venice from the pit of
darkness. “ Don't you put that bull's-eye this
way, else God knows what you won't see ! ”

“And he'll never go back to his wife again,”
sang Shirley. “ I know men.”

“ You ain't allowed to swim here,” said the
Voice tremendously. “Are they. Bill ? Out of
it, now ! ”

“ I do wish,” Hugo said violently, “ that perfect
strangers wouldn't force themselves on us like
this. Anyone would think we were at a Royal
Garden Party ! ”

The canoe rocked frantically. “ Damn you,
Guy ! ” said Napier. The constable turned his
bull's-eye to where he thought Guy's face would
be, then flashed it a foot higher.

“ About this law,” murmured Guy.

“ Now, sir,” said the Voice, rather pathetically
I thought. “ I don't want to have no trouble.”

“ The very word ! I was just going to ask you
if it would be troubling you too much to ask you
to run up to your house to lend us some towels.
It really would be very kind of you. Our friend
here hasn't brought us quite enough. . . .”

Splash !

“ Look 'ere,” began the Voice desperately.

“ Don't look, constable ! Be strong. Use your
will-power. Women are but idle vanities.”

272 THE GREEN HAT

“Oo!" gurgled Venice. “If you only knew
how lovely it was ! Come on, everybody. Oh,
it's so warm ! "

“ Now remember, Venice — in a straight line
between the banks."

“ That's right, sir," said the voice.

“You and your banks!" sighed Shirley.
Splash ! “ Ow, it's freezing ! "

“ An' it's not their boat ! " pleaded the man in
shirt-sleeves. “ They got no right in that boat.
It's Lord Lamoma's, that is."

“ Good Lord, Johnny's! And he’s kept it hidden
from us!" Splash! “ Where are you, Venice?
Shirley?"

“ Napier, be careful ! " cried Iris, laughed Iris. . . .

“ Are you gentlemen saying as you're friends of
Lord Lamorna's?" asked the voice.

“Friends!" said Hugo. “I won't know him.
We served together in Romano's Riflemen, but
now he'll be jolly lucky if we don't scuttle his
boat. Owes me a fiver. Good-bye."

The river was warm, soft, quiet. Most un-English
were the waters of the Thames that night, most
Italianate. Never before had one understood the
verity of that phrase “ on the bosom of the waters."

From several yards away I could see the long
shape of the motor-canoe. How Lamorna's credi-
tors would like to hear of that canoe ! Hugo would
blackmail him for his fiver. Dear Hugo. Suddenly
the glow of Iris's cigarette stabbed the darkness,
and maybe that was her shadow there, and that
the one foot in the water. . . .

“Who's that?" she gasped.

I was anchored to her ankle. My hand could
have gone twice round it.

“ Take care of them," she whispered. “ Dear,

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 273

take care of them. Keep your eyes on that Venice
child. She's reckless. Quick, and catch them
up. I rely on you somehow "

“ You mustn't, Iris. I am enemy to Iris Storm."

“ Oh, friends and enemies 1 One relies on what
people are in themselves, no matter what cir-
cumstances may make them feel.''

“And circumstances, Iris — do they make a
woman so heartless ? "

“ Heartless ! That's a large word, rather.
Heartless ? But maybe I am tired of being un-
happy. So maybe I walked into a garden and built
a high wall round it. Oh, may be, may be ! Dear
friend, go after them now. I am nervous, they're
so young. By their voices, they seem to have
gone very far. ..."

But from the water the voices seemed to come
from within a foot of one's ear. They must, I
thought, be straight ahead, towards the opposite
bank. Swiftly a whisper cut the water near me,
past me. “ Young slacker !'' came Guy's murmur.
But I, not for exercise was I on the bosom of the
waters that night. I lazed, listening to the voices
ahead, sharp and clear across the water. Dimly,
softly, clammy-cold, a weed would brush one.
The stars were like the lance-points of a mighty
host marching down to the chastisement of the
world. But the darkness baffled them, whilst I
floated into the heart of it, I loitered.

“ Mind your head on this quay here, Venice !
Venice! Hello, where's Venice?"

“Here. I say, what's this place?"

“ Oh, my pretty dears, why isn't one always in
the water ! I say, what's this wooden thing?"

“Looks like a landing-stage to me. What? I
say, Hugo, what's this place? What?"

THE GREEK HAT

2 74

"Am I a graduate of Maidenhead, asking me?
But let's try tlu place, anyvay "

“ Fve heard there's a River-Night-Club arrange-
ment about here. Very exclusive."

" We know. Excludes all who can't crowd in.
Come on. Me for vine."

I found them, having almost broken my shins
against a wooden affair, lying grouped on what
Shirley said was unmistakably “ a sweep of velvet
sward/' Venice, it seemed, was exploring. You
couldn't see your hand before your face. But you
didn’t want to.

“ Funny," sighed Hugo, “ if chap, just any chap,
probably quite a nice chap, but timid chap, wakes
from sleep to see Venice looking m on him. Mer-
maid theory. . . ."

“ Wot’s this ? " snapped a voice. “ You're
trespassing."

“ What did you think we were doing?" Napier
asked mildly. “ Playing dominoes?"

“Tell us what this place is," said Shirley
severely, “ and perhaps we may let you go."

“ Gawd, don’t you know The River Club i "

“ I knew it was," said Hugo proudly, “ as soon
as I picked up a bus-ticket scented with Bacardie
Rum "

“ But where's Venice ? " cried Shirley sharply.
“Venice, Oh!"

The darkness stirred, and from the river-edge
Napier called on the name of Venice.

“ All right, all right ! Here I am."

“ Venice ! " cried Guy sharply. “ Keep straight
ahead towards that canoe."

“ I'll swear," said Napier, “ her voice came a
good way from the left. What?"

“ From the right, and what to you," said Hugo.

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 275

" From the left/' said Napier, and there was a
faint splash and a faint rustle from the water.

"Now, Shirley/' said Guy, "I'll drown you if
you go playing any fancy tricks. Come along,
let's race back/'

"Naps, found her?"

" Oh, she's only playing the fool I " came Napier's
voice. " Heard her a moment ago. It’s all right."

I think that Guy and Hugo and Shirley must
have deflected rather to one side, for although I
was the poorest swimmer of the four I arrived
first at the boat. My sight in the darkness was
not helped by bumping my head against the gun-
wale.

" Iris f Iris ? "

" Hello, wheie's Iris? What? God, it's
dark. . . /'

" But haven't you found Venice?"

" Oh, she's playing the fool ! Missed her. ..."
We held on to the gunwale, panting. " <;od, man,
where's Iris? What? I say, Ins!"

" She must have got out to stretch her legs,"
I said.

"Yes — God, look!" panted Napier. "What
the devil! What?"

Hugo's voice, Shirley's, Guy's. . . .

Napier and I were in the canoe. Iris's white
dress lay anyhow over the cushions in the middle,
over the watches and rings. I stumbled over her
shoes.

" Oh 1" sobbed Shirley. "Something's hap-
pened!"

"Naps, what is it?" snapped Guy from the
water.

" Iris — I say, she must have changed her mind
and gone in r'

THE GREEN HAT

276

“ Stuff, changed her mind ! Gone in after

Venice, you mean ! ”

“Iris! Iris!” Hugo called. We all called.
“But where's Venice?” Shirley screamed just
as Napier plunged in again.

“Iris! Venice! Iris!”

“For God's sake, Naps, take care!” snapped

Guy. “ Don't go under that bridge.”

“Iris! Venice! Venice!”

Shirley was sobbing. In the pitch darkness. . . .
“ Hugo,” said Guy, “ you and I together, for
that bridge. Here, this way. . . . Naps, Naps!
Come back, you fool ! ”

“Help. . . .”

“ God, who's that ! Iris? Venice?”

“ Help . . . here, to the right. . . .” An
exhausted whisper from the pit of the water.

“It's Iris,” said Guy. “Where are you, Iris?
Here, I'm in the waiter. Hold on.”

“ Quick . . . tired. ...”

“But where's Venice?” screamed Shirley.

“ All right, Iris has got her. ...”

Iris's whisper : “ Call Napier back. Oh dear. .
“Naps! Naps!”

“All right, coming.”

“ Hang on, Hugo ! ” said Guy from the water.
“ Iris coming. Pull, you fool. I've got Venice.”
“ Please, my foot. . . .”

“ Hugo, don't capsize the bloody boat !” sobbed
Shirley. “ Naps, here they are ! Guy, give me
Venice at once ! Venice ! ”

“All right, Guy.” Was that Venice's voice?
“ I can manage. . . .”

“You've managed quite enough, you have!”
said Hugo. “You all right. Iris?”

Iris was lying panting somewhere in the canoe.

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 277

Mostly on our flannels, I thought. But you
couldn’t see a thing. We were on the quay, Hugo,
Guy, and I. Then Napier came. A silent, phantom
presence.

“ Don't strike a match, anyone,” Iris whis-
pered. " I’m in my chemise . . . what’s left
of it. . . .”

A sob, a jumble, a cry : “ Oh God, Oh God 1
I’m so glad to be back !”

" Little donkey ! ” said Guy. “ All right now,
Venice?”

“ Hugo,” Iris called, very huskily, “ where’s that
champagne ? Venice would like. Child, must you
breathe your last down my neck?”

" You saved me!” sobbed Venice. “ Yes, you
did!”

" Ssh ! ”

” Ow, I was frightened ! ”

“ Like a mouse in the water. Poor Venice. . . .”

“ Here’s another towel, Mrs. Storm,” said
Shirley brusquely. Shirley would be a little jealous
now of Venice liking Iris. . . .

" Listen ! ” cried Venice into the night. “ This
woman saved me. Saved my life, she did ! 'Oil’
said I, and there she was, quick as quick. . . .”

" But, Venice, you’re sitting on my only other
stocking, and I’ve only got two!”

“ Pop ! ” said the champagne.

“ Have mine, please do ! Like barefoot.
Jimmy, I got such a bump on the head.”

“ How?” Guy asked dangerously.

“ Against the bridge, please. . . .”

“ That’s only bump (a),” said Hugo kindly.
“ There’s still bump (b) coming to you, if I heard
aright.”

“ You did,” said Guy.

THE GREEN HAf

278

“ You leave her alone ! ” snapped Shirley.

" Venice ?” Napier's voice, a white, still voice.
He was kneeling, beside me, peering into the canoe.
" All right now, Venice ?”

“ Yes, Naps.” A shy, uncertain voice that was.
She was afraid. “ You must thank Mrs. Storm
for that. ...”

Napier did not call on Iris’s name. Hugo chat-
tered to cover the silence. I thought I heard Guy
mutter something between his teeth. During the
next few minutes Hugo’s dexterity with the cham-
pagne was a great iciiof. Dear Hugo.

“Venice! ” said Guy beside me, chill, queerly harsh.
“Your health, Venice 1 You'll need a good deal,
if you go playing any more tricks like that.”

Shirley was saying : “ Here’s another towel,

Mrs. Storm. Do have my stockings, please. ...”

“ Oh . . . no, it's quite all right, really.
Please, really. But would you mind seeing if my
shoes are anywhere there, by the steering-wheel
thing?”

Formal, like the voices of women in a drawing-
room.

Iris called to me for a cigarette. It was her
right hand to which I gave it. It seemed very
naked, that right hand. “ Your ring, Iris?”

“ In the Thames,” she whispered. " Fallen for
ever ! Not a word. ...”

Venice was explaining to the darkness, gulping
lavishly at her champagne : “ Thought I'd go for
a swim and not just paddle about. Thought I'd
be clever. Thought you were fools. Thought I’d
thought right. Thought I'd — anyhow, I caught my
head crack (a) on that bridge. And then I didn't
want to let out a yell about nothing and look a
silly ass. Heard you calling me, but thought I'd

THE FALL OF THE EMERALD 279

better keep my breath for swimming. Began
swimming, and got a weed like a wrestler's torso
round me. Head hurt, like hell it did. Thinks I,
now for a yell, but began kicking instead "

“ You would 1 "

“ Wait. And my head hurt. And I was fright-
ened to death. And I prayed like fury. Naps I
Where's Naps? I missed you. And when I wanted
to yell all I could let out was a miaow. And Mrs.
Storm — well. Iris, as she saved my life, cries out :
* Oi, what's that? Who? Where?' And before
you could say knife, and just as I was succumbing
to a watery grave, she was saving my life, quick
as you like. Quick, terse stuff. She could swim
us all off our feet, she could. ..."

u Get veiy easily tired," Iris said.

" Iris !" Napier's voice, sharp. “ You dressed?
What? Risky for you, messing about, after your
illness,"

“ I'm almost ready, Napier." Impatient, Iris's
voice was, I thought,

" Naps, get a rug from the car. She's shivering."

“ Please ! " Iris whispered, frantically, desper-
ately. " For pity's sake, please not I

Silence. . . .

As we collected round the two motor-cars, Guy,
fiddling about with his starting-arrangements,
seemed, I thought, to be saying something. But
he was only swearing.

At the back of the Hispano Iris went to sleep
against my shoulder. She spoke in her sleep :
" You will find me quite light on you, as I haven't
got a chemise. They say it is very smart, to be
chemiseless. Already I feel less of an outlaw from
society. She did it on purpose."

" Iris I "

28 o

THE GREEN HAT

“ She did. Half on purpose. 1 know she did.
The pet ! Oh, dear . . .”

" But, Iris, why ? ”

" Because, dear. So that I should like her . . .”
“ Oh 1 Well, do you ? "

“ Yes. Oh, yes.”"

“ Well ? ”

“ I’m sorry if my hair is tickling your face.”

" Well, now you like her, does it make any
difference ? ”

“ No. Oh, no.”

" Oh ! ”

“ Good-night.”

THE LAST CHAPTER

Saint George Jor England I

i

OW as I come to that last night of all,
a night that was as though set on a
stage by a cunning but reckless crafts-
man of the drama, and as I look every
way I may at the happenings that were
staged on the platform of that night, I do sincerely
thank my stars that it is no novel I have set my
hand to but a faithful chronicle of events. For it
would seem that the novelist, so he is an honest
man and loves his craft, must work always under
a great disadvantage in his earnest wish to tell
of life truthfully ; since, as the old, old saying
is, he never can dare to be so improbable as life.
He may, to be sure, be as dingy as life, according
to the mode of the day, or he may even achieve
the impossible and be more dingy than life, also
according to the mode of the day, but to be as
improbable as life will be as far beyond the honest
novelist's courage as it must be against the temper
of his craft ; for should his characters have to
“ break out/' should the novelist be so far gallant
as to concede something to the profligate melo-
drama of life, his people may only " break out ”
along lines which the art of their creator has laid
out and made inevitable for them ; whereas you
and I know that living men will do queer things

G.H. ?

2&2 THE GREEN HAT

which arc desperately alien from what we had
thought th*cr possibilities — nay, impossibilities — to
be, living men will dof}/ the whole art of character-
isation in the twinkling of an eye and destroy every
canon of ait in a throb of a desire : so that we may
make no count or chart of the queer, dark sides of
our fellows, nor put any limit, of art, psychology,
romance or decency, to the impossibilities which
are, within the trembling of a leaf, possible to men
and women.

It is not often that I see Venice nowadays, for
she lives for the most part with her father in the
country, but now and again she will ask me to
luncheon in her house in Upper Brook Street, or
maybe I will call there on a sudden and find her
sitting alone with an unopened book. We do
not ever talk of that night, noi of the two chief
players of that night, but the other day it came
about that i found her sitting absorbed in the
shadows of a dying fire, and 1 somehow said :
M Waiting, Venice, waiting ! "

She was crouched like a child in the gloom of a
Dorothy chair, and as I sat in another nearby a
friendly flame darted through the twilight and
made toys of her eyes. They were looking at me
with every appearance of deep reflection, but
now it was a woman who was looking out at me
from Venice's eyes, and the woman seemed to
smile, and she said : “ He is in India, with Bruce's
expedition. He will be coming home soon."

And then for the first time we spoke of that
tempestuous night in July, the night but one after
the children's party. But of course I did not tell
Venice all, particularly about the last part, accord-
ing to the promise sworn between Sir Maurice
Harpenden, Hilary and me.

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND ! 283

My clock was about to strike nine o'clock, as
I very well remember for 1 had nothing to do but
stare at it, when the telephone-bell beat it, may I
say, by a short head, and Iris's voice said :

" Is that you? "

" And who should it be," I said, “ but me?
I am so glad you lang up, Iris."

" Oh, you are lonely !"

They shout on the telephone, people do, so
that one cannot always hear them very, very
well. But this fell lady's slightly husky voice
was considerate and clear.

" But fancy," she said, “ finding } T ou at home
now, and all the world at dinner or the play 1
Dear, are you, too, a social outcast? T am so
sorry you have had to dine alone."

“ Iris, you should have brought up the friends
of your childhood to a better understanding of
the arts of peace. 1 was to have dined with Hilary
to-night, and because of my engagement with
him I did not go to a dinner where 1 was to sit
beside a woman w r ho has studied the Yogi philoso-
phies and was divorced last year in New York
with nine co-respondents, the tenth being dis-
qualified on the ground that he was a black man
weighing seventeen stone in his boots. And then
Ross rings me up at half-past seven to say that
Hilary has been called to the country ! "

“ Yes, I knew you had been put off for dinner.
I w'as so shocked."

"Thank you. But, Iris, you knew?"

“ Oh, I know everything ’ But listen, I am
ringing you up to ariv you a plain question, and
I would like, please, a plain answer. Does it mean
anything to you that I am leaving England to-
morrow at dawn?"

THE GREEN HAT

284

0 You depress me, Iris Storm/*

" But I, oh I am so gay 1 "

“ Yes, that is what depresses me. My friends are
wretched, but you are gay I Iris, we are all of us
miserable sinners, but you are a very captain of
wickedness. Iris, you are a wrecker of homes,
and you say you are gay ! I am not being
flippant. I have dined alone."

w Dear, I understand. I do respect your
disapproval, you must believe me, or else I would
answer that we begin to die when we are bom,
that all comes from God and goes to the devil,
and so what does anything matter ? But listen,
O father and brother of disapproval, would you like
to see me before I leave England to-morrow at
dawn ? "

“ Yes," I said, " I would."

" ‘ See' me, I said, not 4 murder* me V*

** But, Iris, I can qualify nothing to-night ! ”

“ My idea is to take you into the country
to-night. We go & deux. We go into a darkness.
My friend, there is a sun-dial in a certain garden,
and it is written that you and I shall stand by
that sun-dial before we part to meet nevermore/'
“ Iris, your voice is laughing, but you are not
laughing. What does that mean?"

" But I am afraid I I am laughing with
fear. ..."

“ And we are driving into the country to escape
your fear?"

“ Oh, but that hurts I I was never before
accused of being a coward. ..."

" Iris, I'm sorry."

" Sir Maurice Harpenden knows me better than
you do, my friend. Ah, he is very clever, is Sir
Maurice I But you will see. We are driving into

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 285

the country, let me tell you, to meet my feax.
And when we meet it I shall not mock, nor tremble,
nor quail, but I shall be a very Saint George for
steadfastness. That is the programme, so far.
And you, will you be my esquire ? ”

u You speak of darkness, of sun-dials, of fear,
of Sir Maurice Harpenden, whom I do not know,
of Saint George of Cappadocia, whom, alas, one
sees only too little of these days. I think that
you, too, must have dined alone. And you have gone
mad. Else why must we drive into the country ? ”

" But we go to keep high company to-night,
that’s why I Are you afraid of that ? The captains
and the kings of the countryside are our
adversaries. Sweet, you and I shall stand
arrayed against the warriors of conduct.”

“ Not I, Iris ! I am for conduct.”

“ You lie, dear. You are for love 1 Oh, why
do you lie?”

" Because one must be reasonable, Iris.”

“ Oh, because this, because that, because of the
persecution of men, the savagery of beasts, the
malice of gods ! Free me of your becauses ! Lies,
all lies I One must be truthful, there is no other
law, all other laws are lies. We are educated by
lies, we live with lies, we worship lies, we fight for
lies, we die bearded with lies. God made men out
of clay, and countries out of mud, and what can the
son of a marriage between clay and mud be but
Master Lie? Oh, let us have just one look at the
Demoiselle Truth I ”

" Unfortunately, Iris, that demoiselle shows a
different figure to all of us. Now I may like her
with a trivial ankle, tawny hair, boyish breasts,
but another may like her with golden hair and
spacious loins, as Rubens painted women ”

286

THE GREEN HAT

" I will say this for you, that when you insult
one you do it with kindness. It is kind of you to
have described me a c > your idea of the demoiselle.
I am pioud of my breasts, because they are so
beautiful. Life is generally so rude to a woman's
breasts, but it has oni> kissed mine "

“ Iris, you are shocking the girl at the ex-
change ! "

" No, no. Miss Dell has prepared her for any-
thing ! But you haven't yet said if you will be my
esquire into the country? Why are you so silent? "

44 But, Iris, 1 don't understand a word of this !"

“ Sweet, do we need to wait on your under-
standing I Chivalry ? "

" Away with that from me to you ! You always
chose the man’s part,"

" Gallantry?"

44 But I shall be gallant to another in being
ungallant to you ! "

44 Friendship? "

44 You are driving me very hard. Iris. I do not
want to say what is in my mind."

44 Can you stand there with your lips to the
receiver, which I hope your servants keep clean
for you, and tell me you are not my friend? Can
you stand there facing me across Queen Street,
Curzon Street, Hertford Street, Hamilton Place,
Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge, and tell
me that you are not my friend? I am sitting here
on the edge of the bed, in the next room is Mrs. Oden
trying to pretend she is not listening to every word
I say, all round me are trunks and boxes, about me
is a leather jacket with a collar of a few minks, and
on my head is one green hat. Are you not my
friend? Answer me ! Answer me, I say! Dear,
a woman must have one friend 1 It is usual."

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 287

" But the emerald is gone, Iris ! So you are
not the Iris I knew* You were Iris Storm, you
are Iris March, and I never have met Iris March. 0

“ The emerald was wise. There’s a galanterie
in jewels unknown to men, I see that. So you
won’t come for a drive with me? Our last?”

“ I never said that, Iris ! ”

" Ah, I have frightened him ! Well, I will come
round for you in five minutes. How are you
dressed ? In black and white ? Maybe I would
have preferred you in something less formal, in
something more

” Enough of pour U sport , Iris f Oh, enough,
enough I ”

288

THE GREEN HAT

2

And so we were again, again and for the last
time, in that swift motor-car, wrapped in the gentle
silences of the night. The oppression of the heat
was gone since the rains of yesterday, but even
yet London could not quite rouse itself from the
stupor of the past tropical week. And to-night
the flight of the stork did not torment the hosts
of the midgets, ” for,” said Iris from the shadow
of her green hat, ” there is no hurry, no hurry at
all.”

A clock in the High Street of Kensington was at
a little after half-past nine o'clock. The wide
sweep of road towards Olympia was quiet with
the gentle traffic of no-man 's-hour, for such is a
little after half-past nine o'clock. I said : ” I do
wish you would tell me what all this is about.”

“ It begins a long time ago, it is a long story.
Having to do with the loves of babes, the wisdom
of sucklings, and the sins of the fathers. And the
sins of the fathers. But I will tell you more when
we come to Harrod's.”

“ But we passed Harrod's long ago ! ”

“ There is another. You will see. Patience.”

Through Hammersmith and Chiswick, by Rane-
lagh and Roehampton, we sped into the veiled
countryside. The glow of London was a yellow
arch in the night behind. We passed the last
omnibus on its last journey to a far-flung comer
of the town.

“ But,” I pleaded, ” I don't even know where
we are going to ! ”

" Why, to Sutton Marie! Didn't I tell you?
It's not far. ...”

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 289

“ But I don't know Sir M amice ! Really, Iris,
how dare you let me in for this?'*

“ It is all right, dear, you are expected. I said
to Hilary, not an hour ago on the telephone : ' I
am not for Sutton Marie unless I may bring my
one friend/**

“ Well, I never heard such check ! And why,
Iris, am I your one friend ?"

0 Because once upon a time you shamed me of
my shame. Because you did not hold me cheap.
Because romance dies kaid m you. Because, dear,
I rather like you. And that is why I told Hilary
that you were my friend and that I would not dare
Sutton Marie without you, adding that as he had
put you off for dinner it would be something for
you to do."

“ Iris, you are laughing all the time, you who
told me you were afraid ! **

She glanced at me just then, and that second's
smile is like a wound on my memory. A car
screamed and passed us, and she cried through the
disordered air : 0 I am afraid, but of course I am
gay, too ! Haven't I waited twelve years for my
inheritance !"

The flame of the lights on the road ahead made
a wall of blackness on each side of us. I was like
a child in this blackness, and it seemed to me that
her voice was the voice of the night. I did not know
what to say. I said : " Iris, that girl will die with-
out Napier."

Minutes later, she said : “ If people died of love
I must have risen from the dead to be driving
this car now ! "

“ Indeed, Iris, how can I argue about love
against your experience ! "

“ My friend, you can't shame me ! For I am shame

290

THE GREEN HAT

itself come to life Yes, I have lit many small
fires to quench one large fire. I have been un-
successful. Thank God, thank God for that I
And now let the one large fire bum, with a boy
and a girl of eighteen for fuel. Nothing else
matters/'

" My dear, so much else matters I Restraints,
nobilities, decencies, sacrifices I "

We passed slowly through a village High Street,
hailed and mocked good-naturedly by a group of
men emerging from an inn.

She said ; “ In the ancient love-tales and the
songs of the Jongleurs we read of maidens sacrificed
on the altar of circumstance. I was a maiden,
even I, once upon a time. Dear, 1 am afraid you
must take my word for that. And I, a maid,
was sacrificed to the vulgar ambitions of a Sir
Maurice. So let us not talk of sacrifice. It makes
me sick with anger/'

Not fast, not slow, the Hispano Suiza swept
tiirough Surrey. Then she said sharply : " But
if Venice had had a child ! "

I could not see her face, for her hat and the
darkness were between us. But ever so faintly I
could see her mouth, and hex lips were parted, as
though she was praying. I wondered if she was
praying, to whom she could be praying. “ She
has a God/' had said that captain of men

" And why did you say that so bitterly. Iris?"
"Was I bitter? Oh, that's a sin, to think of
that angel and to be bitter."

" Angel ? Did you say angel ? "

" I said angel," she said, and no other answer
had I but from the stork crying dolorously to warn
corners of our flight.

" If Venice," she said reasonably, " had had a

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 291

child, I would have called to Napier in vain* We
can't know the beginning and end of honour, nor
what it is, nor what it will do, nor what will debauch
it, nor what will make it unbending as iron. Let us
say I have debauched Napier's honour* Oh, let
us say anything ! We don’t stand on words on
ultimate nights like these. Honour is like a little
child, let us say, and like a little child it may be
led away bv a shining tov md in this case I am
the shining toy. Rut Lad Venice had a child I
might have shone like Aldeb ran and called Napier
in vain. And that would have been right and
just. We must all give way before children,
always, always Oh, if people had always done
that, what miseries wouldn’t the world have been
spared ! Those' whose dreams are clean must give
way to children, for babies will carry clean dreams
further than the wisest of old men, and slowly
the world will rise above the age of smoke and
savagery. ...”

" Rut it's absurd, Iris ! What chance has the
girl had of having a child yet ! "

“ Rut I am not pretending to play fair ! Or
did you think I was? 1 awoke from my illness,
and I awoke suddenly to life. Awaking, I took my
chance as it came. And quickly, quickly, for fear
of giving Venice a longer chance. And it's because
1 haven't played fair that 1 am going to Sir
Maurice's house now."

" Oh I” I said. " Good God ! Let me out of
this car. Iris ! I will walk back to London."

" Napier doesn't know Napier would be frantic
if he knew. Napier is dining with Venice to-night.
They would both be frantic if they knew I had
taken Sir Maurice's challenge and gone down to
Sutton Marie. But I must go, to make unfairness

292

THE GREEN HAT

a little less unfair. I must let Sir Maurice have his
last joy of me. Besides, there is a fascination in
letting men tell the truth to one. There is a fasci-
nation in wondering if it will ever be the truth.
But look I Oh, look ! There is Harrod's I "

The car had pulled up on the brow of a small
hill. The lights searched across the road into an
unhedged field. Iris pointed along the flame of
light.

" There is Harrod's," she said gravely.

"But where is Harrod's? I see a field and
what looks like a giant oak."

" That is Harrod's. Not an oak, but an ash.
It is very old, and smells of fairies and moonlight/'

There were once two roads that led away from a
certain tree. . . .

The tree, a solitary giant of enormous girth,
stood perhaps twenty yards from the road. Its
trunk dammed the far-flung eyes of the car, and
in the light its leaves were made of silver, and you
fancied that, had there been a breath of wind, it
had spoken from its ancient wisdom, of which
this night stood so sorely in need; but never a
whisper stirred the countryside.

" Iris, doesn't that make your passions look
. . . silly? "

She took my hand, and lifted it, and dropped
it. I do not know why she did that. Her face
was hidden. It seemed to me that a long time
passed before she spoke, and I seemed to think
of many things.

" If there was a moon," she said at last, " a little
way behind Harrod’s you would see a small hill,
and on the hill you would see a white house. That
is where Gerald and I were born. Perhaps Gerald
knows why now. That is one of the many things

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 293

Napier and I have to talk out in the solitudes, why
all we men and women are bom. There must
be a reason. Across the fields this way is Sutton
Marie, where Napier was born. We used to play
beneath this tree, Gerald, Boy, Napier and I.
Boy was older than us, and bossed us. So there
was a revolt, and then we made two camps, Boy
and Gerald, Napier and I. Sometimes Aunt Eve,
who took care of Gerald and me when mother
died, would take us all up to London, and we
would have tea at Harrod’s. Napier and I loved
Harrod’s, because we at once got lost there. And
so we called this tree Harrod's, because we were
happy here, too. We were twelve then. Later on
they discouraged our being together. Aunt Eve
didn’t want me to be made miserable when I
grew up by not being allowed to marry Napier,
for she knew that I didn’t come inio Sir Maurice’s
plans. Poor Maurice, I’ve crashed into them
now, haven’t I ! Father got poorer, we sold this
house, and went to live in Cambridge Square.
Napier was not allowed to see me any more, but
we managed to meet somehow. Gerald helped,
Aunt Eve helped. Boy helped. That was when
Boy first loved me, he said later, because of my
determination not to lose Napier. But Sir Maurice
won. I was stronger than Napier, but I was not
so strong as Sir Maurice. He wanted Napier to
marry a rich girl, and Iris March was only the
daughter of the younger branch of a bankrupt
house. One day, when I was eighteen, I got a
wire from Napier to meet him here at Harrod's
that afternoon. I borrowed the money for a taxi
— bit from Boy, bit from Hilary — and here Napier
was, white, desperate. In a general clean-up
before going up to Oxford he had promised his

294 THE GREEN HAT

father never to see me again. * I like Iris/ Sir
Maurice had said ' hut she comes of rotten
stock/ 1 don't think we had ever realised before
that we were in love. 1 suppose 1 grew up in that
one second. But Napier was still a boy of
eighteen, while I was suddenly as old as the Queen
ol Hearts, I told linn I loved hun Dear, I have
known many men, I have married two, but I have
only told one that I loved him, and he was a boy.
Poor Napier, so torn, wluU, distracted. Afraid of
my love, which seemed to him almost unholy,
afraid of his father, who seemed to him almost
holy. England, ray England 1 His father was
strong in Napier, and the Harpendens were strong
in him. They wue stronger than me at eighteen,
and they were stronger thm the sweet memories
of Harrod’s. I said to Napier then, just over there
where the lights fall by that trunk, I said, eighteen to
eighteen : * Napier, I think 1 have a body that
bums for love. Napier, 1 shall burn it with love,
but I never will say “ I love you M to any man
but you, because it never will be true/ And what
I said at eighteen is true now at tbuty, 1 have never
said I loved him to any man but Napier, for it
hasn't been true. I have given myself, in disdain,
in desire, with disgust, with delight, but I have
kept to that silly, childish boast of mine. I say
that to my shame, but now shame is a weed under
my foot. I married because my body was hungry
for love and bom to love and must love. And I
thought I would destroy my body with love's
delight, but all I did was to destroy a good man.
Hector Storm went oif to Ireland and died because
one night in my sleep I whispered Napier's name.
Or perhaps 1 had whispered it many nights. I
told him that be was being jealous of a ghost, but

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 295

he wouldn't believe. Now all those things are
passed. The nymph unloosened her girdle to
desire, and now she has unloosened it to her only
love. One grows out of everything, even desire !
and then one can love. Look, Harrod's is smiling,
all silver and smiling ! Here Sir Maurice sacrificed
me twelve years ago. To-night I have to say to
him : ' This is what you have done. Mam ice — the
unhappiness of Venice, the unhappiness of your
son, and twelve yeais of hell for me. Are you
content ? 1 Oh God, it’s been hell, these twelve
years ! If you had kissed hell, as 1 have kissed
hell, if you had sacrificed to hell, as I have sacrificed
my body to hell, you would know what I mean.
But now I can’t grudge Maurice the final satisfac-
tion of telling me wnat he thinks of me. Dear, it
matters so little what men like Maurice think of
one. They worship all that is despicable, they
despise all that is really good. Fiom the beginning
of time this world has been woundc d by the manli-
ness of fools. Oh, let Maurice have his say to-
night ! And mighty Guy. And my sweet Hilary !
Let them have their say. I can only answer them
with love. How could I answer them but with
love ? But I can silence them with love ! Love,
love, love ! A glorious word, a matchless word !
But isn't it ? Love, love 1 I am in love, I glory
in love, I will die in love ! Love, my sweet, love,
love I To be in love as I am in love is to be in
heaven before hell was made. I am in love ! ”

The car rushed on, up a wide slope that cuived
handsomely so that the light played on meadows
and startled the beasts of the fields.

“ And you are so sure. Iris, that these three
men, who have known you all your life and one
of whom has loved you with all his heart ever

THE GREEN HAT

296

since he saw you walk down South Audley Street,
all brown stockings and blue eyes — you are so sure,
Iris, that nothing they can say will touch you?"

The lights swept over great lodge-gates standing
wide open before a curving avenue of tall trees*
We passed beneath them, showering gold on their
trunks. The drive shone like a yellow carpet
beneath our lights.

" I tell you," Iris whispered, " I shall be a very
Saint George for steadfastness I"

] he stork fled up the curving avenue of Sutton
Marie. It seemed, to me, to crouch with fear
beneath the noble line of trees. They stood above
us like towers. I was afraid.

"This is the lion's den, Iris I"

" Well, I have killed lions, and tigers too, in
twelve years' wanderings through hell."

" But this is the den of the king of lions, Iris !
This is the den of the lion of England 1 "

" Love smiles at lions. Love can never be a
clown, but a lion can wear an ass's skin. Darling,
I'm no good at natural history, but I have studied
history."

" You couldn't mock it so unless you loved it
very deeply. You are like a child, dear Iris, daring

her father and mother. These trees "

“ But I laugh at the trees of Sutton Marie 1 I
always did, I never could play with them, not
even believe in them. I tell you, there is no tree
but Harrod's, my servant, and my master and my
playmate tree, Harrod's. Oh, how Harrod's hates
Sir Maurice I It makes me afraid, to think how
Harrod's hates Maurice Harpenden. Let him
beware as he walks beneath it I "

Then the trees parted from above us and we
came into an open place where stood a fountain.

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND I 297

and round the fountain we swept a circle and
came before the doors of a long white manor house.
De Tra vest’s car stood there. As we drew up
beside it the doors of ti>c white house opened and
a fat old man stood at the head of the steps. His
hair was like his house, quite white.

" Truble, we will go round by the garden," Iris
said.

The fat old butler looked very gravely down at
Ins. She was like a small knight at the foot of
the broad steps, he a kindly old dragon up above.
Oh, he looked so grave !

Iris said to me : “ Mr. Truble is my oldest

friend. He is a very nice man. Truble, what have
you to say to that ? "

" Sir Maurice did not expect you, Miss Iris."

“ How, Truble ! Sir Maurice knew I was com-
ing!"

“ But he did not think you would come, Miss
Iris. But his lordship expected you. The gentle-
men are in the library."

" His lordship, Truble, does me too much honour
in thinking I can keep my word. . . . Truble,
my dear ! "

I had been looking round me when that sudden
cry shook me like the cry of a bird in pain. The
fat old butler was weeping, there was not a doubt
of it. There at the head of the broad steps, quite
motionless, a broad black shape under his white
hair. Iris had him by the shoulder, was shaking
him, her hat like a toy against that black shape.

“ Truble," she said, so huskily, " that I should
ever have made you cry ! My dear, my dear !"

" Sir," the old man appealed to me down below
with a funnily out-flung hand. " 1 never was so
ashamed of myself in my life ! But it came on
g.h. * u

THE GREEN HAT

2g 8

me all of a sudden hearing Miss Iris say, here at
the doors of Sutton Marie, in a voice as hard as
that ash she was always in love with, that about
his lordship doing her too much honour about her
keeping her word. I held Miss Iris in my arms,
sir, when she wasn't above a year old, and now —
I'm sure I beg your pardon, sir. And yours, Miss
Iris. I’m sure I don’t know what's come over me
to-night. ..."

One leather arm had the old man by the shoul-
der. Iris's face seemed painted white.

“ Truble," she said, so huskily, “ I am so sorry
to have upset you. You have been faithful to me,
Truble, for thirty years, and now, I suppose, you
mustn't love me any more. You don x love me
any more, Truble?"

" Miss Iris, Miss Iris ! There's no good comes
from loving, I see that ! "

" Then, Truble, I here and now do release you
from giving me a thought ever again. Adieu,
Truble."

Her face painted white, her eyes absorbed in
what they did not see, she came down to where I
stood. “ Come," she said, expressionless. She
could make her words into pieces of iron, and I did
not dare to look at the motionless old man at the
head of the steps. We skirted the house in silence.
I supposed we were on a lawn. The rains of yes-
terday had not softened the drought, the grass
was hard as stone under the feet. I said : “ Iris,
you are moved already — you who were not to be
moved by anything that was said ! "

I felt her fingers tightening round my arm.
Hers were strong white fingers. “ I hadn't bar-
gained for Truble. He should have been in bed
by now. Often in moments of self-hatred and

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 299

contempt I have taken a little heart from that old
man's devotion. And he would always send me
wishes on my birthday. No, I hadn't bargained
for Truble. . . . Look ! "

" Why, they are playing bridge ! "

" And, dear, how grimly I See, Hilary is looking
quite young, he must have a bad hand. And Guy
Apollo Belvedere — Oh, he's thinking ! — and then
he plays the wrong card ! Ah, poor Guy I He
always did treat his trumps as though they were
tulips, with too much respect. And Sir Maurice !
Now, dear heart, what do you think of Sir Maurice?
Isn't he the handsome soldier ! "

" Oh, handsome I Napier with a gay sinner's
face. ..."

“ Judge him for me I Oh, do ! Here we are,
conspirators, whispering. Now, judge me, first,
Mr. Townshend of Magralt."

“ Iris, must I ! Can I ? I can't ! "

" Of course you must, can, will ! Speak without
thinking. It is only thus that truth is made."

“ He is a good man. His goodness is supported
by his principles, his kindness is rebuked by his
prejudices. He is not a weak man, but he is the
weakest man in that room. He has loved but one
woman in his life, and she has crucified his heart
on a hundred carnal Calvarys. But he still loves
her, and that is why he is the weakest man in that
room."

“ And you, satyr, you are the cruellest man I
ever met in my life I But judge me, secondly, my
lord Viscount de Travest."

94 He is the elder brother of honour. He is that
rarest of men, a schoolboy who has grown out of
his schooldays but remains, by strength of will, a
schoolboy. He prefers to be that. He never did

300

THE GREEN HAT

an unworthy thing, and has thought less mean
ones than most people. Like ail decent English-
men, he is like a woman : he knows everything
without ever having been taught anything. He
has a profound sense of obedience, therefore he is
a good commander. He never thinks when he is
alone, lest thoughts should undermine his sense
of obedience and paralyse his habit of command.
One day a thought will strike him, and instantly
he will cease to be the captain of his soul. He is
the only man in England who actually believes in
obeying the King/'

“Oh, how horrified the King would be! And of
Sir Maurice, enemy to Iris March, what have you to
say? Besides the fact that he is the cleverest man
in that room. Oh, he is clever, that Maurice ! It
was he who had old Truble waiting for me. Judge
me that man ! "

" But I don't know him, Iris ! "

“ His face is there, man — the proconsular fea-
tures, the cunning Norman nose, the smile — Oh,
my God, the smile 1 And you won't, my friend,
take my opinion of him?"

“ Iris, how can you ask me to do that ! We
can't take any woman's opinion of any man. They
find evil in good men, they overlook the vices of
cads. ..."

“ Oh, Maurice is not good, not bad ! Only
immemorially infantile, like all successful
men. ..."

Where we stood now the lawn was damp and
velvet-soft, the air whispered of flowers. The
light that fell across the lawn from the three tall
french-windows reached almost to our feet. It
was a long, oak-panelled, scholarly room in which
the three men sat, towards one side, about a

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 301

card-table. They were absorbed in their game,
silent figures of black and white. Yes, the fine
profile of Sir Maurice seemed apt to smile. Iris
murmured : “We will wait for them to finish
their game.”

As my hand moved to throw away a cigarette
I touched a cold stone, and I saw that we were
standing by a sun-dial. Iris was looking at me,
and clearest of all the happenings of that night I
remember that long moment of Iris’s looking,
and how, as I looked into her eyes, her beauty
seemed to enwrap itself with the whisper of the
flowers and enter into my being, so that I cared
not for right nor wrong. My hand rested on the
sun-dial. She laid her hand on mine, and her
hand was colder than the sun-dial.

3 «

THE GREEN HAT

3

Sir Maurice received me very kindly. I had
thought, seeing him at the card-table, that he was
a tall man; but he was small, slight, taut; very
ready to smile. He offered me a cigar, which I
was very pleased to take. Iris said she would not
smoke just yet. No one sat down, but everyone
seemed at their ease. It was as though Iris and
I were paying an evening call Hilary apologised
to me about dinner. I forgave him. Somehow,
suddenly, I found myself absorbed by Guy and
Hilary. I found that Iris was alone. It was
as though her green hat stamped her aloneness
with a light. How bright that green hat looked
in that scholarly room, like a green flower, like a
green flame ! Iris stood by the card-table, on
which the cards were scattered face-upwards.

" Good of you to come, Iris," the General said.
He smiled very easily. He was one of those young
old men who are very old when you look close.
He was charming.

Iris looked up from the cards across the room
to Hilary. Her eyes were untroubled and clear,
she was very still, and her lips were silken red.
She said : " Hilary asked me. So I came."

“ It was my idea, Iris," Sir Maurice said, and he
smiled. He was fidgeting with a black ebony
paper-knife. " My idea entirely. Hilary was
against it. Very glad you brought our young
friend. Sit down, Iris. We are all of the world
here, we are civilised people. Let's talk about
this like civilised people."

Iris did not sit down. Maybe someone sat
down, but I don't remember. Iris picked up the

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND l 303

ace of clubs from the table and looked at it
thoughtfully.

“ That was really why I came, Maurice. Be-
cause it must have been your idea. You are a
very clever man. It was thoughtful of you to

f ive me a chance of saying gaud-bye to Truble.”

he looked up from the ace of clubs to Guy with
her untroubled eyes. She had not once looked at
Sir Maurice. ” Guy, what have you to say to me ?
I think you have wanted to say something to me
for a long time. It would have been cowardly to
leave England for good without giving you the
chance.”

“ Iris,” said Hilary sharply, ” Guy has always
been very kind about you. Hm. Much kinder
than I've been.”

” Yes, dear,” she smiled so suddenly at Hilary.
That was a surprising, complete smile. It excluded
us all, it excluded even Iris and Hilary, it excluded
everyone but the friend of childhood and a long
little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes.
That was a true smile. " Hm,” said Hilary.

Sir Maurice put a whisky-and-soda into my
hand, but I do not remember tasting it. The
slight, poised old gentleman's smile troubled me.
His was too fine a lace to smile like that. He had
clever, darting eyes. I felt that Iris was making an
effort to keep her eyes from him. And I felt that
the two enemies were each terrified of the other.

Guy spoke for the first time, he murmured :
" It was brave of you to come, Iris. I don't know
much about using words, but I think it was noble
of you to come. I don't know any other woman
who would have even thought of accepting
Maurice's invitation. But we, your friends, have
never compared you to other women. In some

304

THE GREEN HAT

things to their disadvantage. We have always
admired your pluck. But we have admired your
candour and honesty even more. That is why
this sickening business baffles us so. Maurice and
I just thought it might be fair both to us and to
you if we were to try to clear it up a little/* And
then Guy snapped i “ I'm damned if I want to
hate you, Iris "

Iris broke the back of the ace of clubs and
dropped it among the others on the green cloth,
where it lay cruelly curled.

“ Steady, Iris, steady ! " said Sir Maurice. And
he tried with the black ebony paper-knife to
straighten out the ace of clubs. And he smiled.
But Iris looked at Guy, and she seemed very tall.

“ Iris," Hilary said gently, " we loved you too
much as a child not to be able to hate the woman
who has gone out of her way to kill every memory
of that child. . .

" That's it, Iris," Guy murmured, restrained,
amiable. " You see, as a child and as a girl you
were very much in our hearts. Much more than
any other child and girl has ever been. I don't
know why. And in spite of all the things you've
done we've always . . . well, we've always kept
one side of us which was yours for the asking. I
mean. Iris, we couldn't believe in you as a . . .
well, as a decent woman, but we've just stayed
fond of you. Even when we've had to hear your
name being pitched about by vile women and
ghastly cads. Until now. But now. . .

“ A moment, Guy ! " The clever, darting eyes,
the neat figure, the iron-grey hair, waving just a
little. He smiled. He waved the black ebony
paper-knife at Iris as though she was a naughty
girl. He knew Iris inside-out, did Sir Maurice.

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 305

She wasn’t all bad, not she. Iris looked at him
for the first time, and the clear untroubled look
seemed now to be fixed stonily. I wondered if
she was afraid. The General spoke quickly, brittle-
bright : “ Guy has just said, Iris, that we've

known you all your life. But there's more than
that, much more. That's why I wanted you to
come here to-night. I wanted to show you us,
Iris. This isn't an ordinary elopement, Napier's

and yours. It's a stab in the back "

" Maurice, am I stabbing you in the back by
coming here?"

"You were always a strange, unfrightened girl.
Iris. But the stab in the back is made. It's
stabbing us, your people, in the back. Venice's
people aren't in this as we are. But that isn't
what I want to tell you. Is it, Guy ? And I've
no intention of trying to beg Napier from you.
I'm not even yet old enough to beg favours from a
woman. No, it seems settled about you and
Napier, as he told me this morning. And I tell
you. Iris, it wasn't my son who spoke to me this

morning. It was an enchanted boy "

“ We are both of us enchanted, Maurice." And
Iris smiled. Her lips looked very red, silken red.

“ Very good, very good ! Well, you go to-
morrow. That's fixed. But I just wanted to
show you us. Iris. I think you have forgotten us
on your travels. You are of us. I think you have
forgotten that. And you are stabbing us in the
back. I’m not talking of Napier now as my son, my
only son. Am I, Guy ? Hilary ? I've taken great

E ride in the boy's career, I haven't married again for
is sake — but let all that go. I'm talking of Napier
now just as one of us here, the us that you belong
to, of the England that we stand for. We, Iris —

THE GREEN HAT

306

von and us— we aren't made only of flesh -and-
blood. There's a little devil of slackness who
stands waiting for any of us who thinks he or she
is only made of flesh -and-blood. We are made
of air, too — this air, Iris, that we are breathing
now. We are made of this air, you and us. We
were born in it, our fathers and mothers were bom
in it. Guy, Hilary, I, you, Napier, we were all of
11s bora within a hundred miles of this room, Guy
at Mace, Hilary at Magralt, Napier and I here at
Sutton Marie, and you not two miles away across
the fields. We are of this soil, Iris, of this air,
of this England which is still our England. My
God, we haven't much left, but we still have this.
That is all I have to say, Iris. I just wanted to
show you us, because I thought you must have
forgotten us. You have decided, Iris, that you
will break into our lives, and break up our lives.
Why, Iris? What sort of hell is your ambition in
the next world? Tell me that."

" No, Maurice ! " said Hilary sharply. " Keep
to this world."

Cold as stones were Iris's eyes on Sir Maurice.
She hated him beyond words or looks. 44 Don't
let's talk of hell, Maurice," she whispered* 44 It
would shock even you if I were to tell you how
much I know about it. I am leaving heil behind
at last. And do you know, Maurice, that hell
looks at me with your face? But I am leaving it
behind now."

" Listen, Iris. Just this one question." Those
clever, darting eyes were curiously, strangely
kind. I could not undertand Sir Maurice. It was
as though he loved, feared, hated, indulged Iris.
He waved the black ebony paper-knife at her.
44 Now I am a man of the world. Iris. Unlike

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 307

Napier, as you know. And what sort of a woman
are you? Tell me that. I have known many bad
women. I have liked some. I have liked you.
Iris. You know that. But this isn't badness.
Damn it, girl, this is evil ! There aren’t any words
in English to describe what we think of a woman
who comes wantonly between a man and his wife,
a man and his career. I’m not saying anything of
your having come between Napier and me. He
looked at me this morning as though he hated me.
But leave me out. You are smashing a man’s
career and you have stolen a man from his wife.
What sort of a woman are you, Iris? Tell us
that.”

" Maurice ! ” And Iris smiled, and those very white
teeth bit the moment into two pieces with their
smile and dropped the pieces into limbo. 44 You
are a baby sometimes, Maurice. You never dream
of asking a woman ‘ what sort of a woman are
you?” so long as she keeps to the laws made by
men. But the first time you see a woman being
a woman, you are surprised.”

44 But what we don’t understand,” Guy mur-
mured amiably, “ is how you’ve come by an
entirely different set of ideas from ours. I mean
. . . well, ideas about loyalty and treachery and
things like that. You see, Iris, we’ve suddenly
found to-day that we simply don’t begin to under-
stand you. Isn’t that so, Hilary? I mean, we
iust don’t seem to think in the same sickening
language.”

" Exactly,” Sir Maurice rapped out. With the
black ebony paper-knife. " That’s it exactly.
Iris, You see, this isn’t just your business and
Napier’s business. This concerns us. This stabs
at the roots of our life, Iris. But you and I don’t

308 THE GREEN HAT

seem to think in the same language. I think in
English/"

Iris whispered, with eyes ol stone : “ Unfortu-
nately, I think in English, too. ..."

“ Oh, come, Iris ! ” Guy murmured.

“ If she didn’t think in English,” I said, “ would
she be here?”

Sir Maurice started. I was surprised, too.

” That’s true,” said he. “ Quite true, boy.
Yes.” And he smiled. I wished he wouldn’t
smile.

“ In that case,” Guy murmured, 44 all I can say
is, Iris, that yours must be a very odd dialect of
English. I mean, in yours there doesn’t seem to
be any distinction between words which — well,
they mean rather a lot to us. We’ve never even
learned how to spell most of them, they’re so
inevitably part of our lives, or should be. I’m not
sure to this day if there’s an s in decency. One’s
born knowing them. . .”

“ Guy, I’ve had twelve years' unhappiness.
You talk to me of those words we are born know-
ing. I have had twelve years’ unhappiness through
not being able to forget those words.”

“ Unhappiness !” Sir Maurice rapped out. u Oh,
come, child I You seem to have done exactly as
you pleased all these years. I’m not saying you
haven’t had bad luck — we’re all sorry about that.
But if you have been unhappy can you blame
anyone but yourself?”

Iris’s face was very stern as she looked at Sir
Maurice. I could not have thought that a beauti-
ful woman could look so stern. And she made
not one gesture of womanhood. She could have
made but one, and asserted her right to live
according to her womanhood. But that would

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND I 309

have seemed to her to be playing not fair.
She must meet men on their own ground
always, always, and she must keep herself on
their own ground without showing the effort
she made. She would advantage herself neither
with her womanhood nor her beauty. She seemed
to look for a long time at Sir Maurice. Her
lips were silken red, and I thought just then that
to kiss them would be to kiss the infinite.

" Yes, Maurice. I can put the blame on three
words."

The General threw the paper-knife on to a small
table, where it fell with a crash. " Weakness?
Wickedness ? Wantonness ? "

" The three words I was thinking of make Sir
Maurice Harpenden."

Then, curiously, Sir Maurice darted a look at
Hilary, as though to see how he stood with Hilary.
Hilary was white. He said : “ I've told you,
Maurice, that you're not free from blame. You've
been too damned imperious with these children."

“ All this," Guy murmured, “ has got me beat.
Pm afraid."

“ It hasn't got you beat at all, Guy," snapped
Hilary. White he was. “ Maurice, years ago,
didn't realise that in our time we are not our chil-
dren's masters. Their ideas are not ours, their
ambitions are not ours. And there's no reason
why they should be, since ours have sent all
Europe to the devil."

Then Iris's voice slashed the room like a sharp
knife : “ Maurice, did you understand what I

said? I am here to-night that you should under-
stand what you have done."

" My dear Iris ! " said Sir Maurice, again picking
up the paper-knife. One saw why he had been so

3io

THE GREEN HAT

successful a soldier. He could evade any issue.
" Boy and girl love ! " he said helplessly to Guy.
He looked at me. “ Boy and girl love I” he said
helplessly.

“ You mustn't despise it, Maurice," Iris sud-
denly smiled, and I had a fancy that her smile was
one of protecting a child from a man's good-sense.
“ It won't do to despise that boy and girl love,
Maurice. It has lasted nearly all my life so far.
And it will last me until 1 die." She looked at
Guy, and as soon as she looked away from the
General the clear, untroubled, boyish look came
back into those enormous eyes. "Napier and I were
in love at eighteen, Guy. Napier and I have always
been in love. But Sir Maurice had other ideas for
Napier, and this is the result of them. I am sorry,
Guy, but I am also human."

" Love ! " rapped out Sir Maurice. He was not
smiling now.

" Love ! " Iris whispered. u Love, Maurice !
You daren't look into my eyes and say you doubt
my love for Napier. You daren't say that my
love is not the only thing in this room that is made
in the image of God. You talk to me of your
England. I despise your England, I despise the
us that is us. We are shams with patrician faces
and peasant minds. We are built of lies, Maurice,
and we toil for the rewards of worms. You would
have Napier toil for a worm's reward, you are sorry
I have broken Napier's career in the Foreign Office.
Maurice, I am glad. To you, it seems a worthy thing
for a good rnan to make a success in the nasty arena
of national strifes and international jealousies.
To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of
puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as
one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 311

world in which to succeed is the highest indignity
that can befall a good man, it is a world in
which good men are shut up like gods in a
lavatory. Maurice, there are better things, nobler
things, cleaner things, than can be found in any
career that will glorify a man's name or nationality.
You thought to bully me with our traditions.
You are right, they are mine as well as yours.
May God forgive you the sins committed in their
name I And may He forgive me for ever having
believed in them. . .

With one darting stride Sir Maurice had his
hand sharply on hei shoulder, that leather shoulder.
And at that moment, when she had seemed at her
strongest, her eyes seemed to flutter from his
unsmiling face. Her eyes were flooded with gentle-
ness, and they seemed to flutter, to want to fly
from that stern, handsome face. Yet Sir Maurice's
eyes were curiously kind. Perhaps that was why
she had suddenly wilted. She hated him so, and
his eyes were curiously kind. That was a clever
man, Sir Maurice. Then, in a second, with an
effort she superbly hid from our eyes, she was
calm again. Always she must meet a man on his
own ground.

“ Iris," Sir Maurice said quietly, his hand on
her shoulder, "I am sorry I caused you unhappi-
ness when you were a child. I admit I wanted
a different alliance for Napier. And you must
admit, child, that the March blood is not a very
encouraging prospect for a father. But I am
sincerely sorry I was unkind to you. But you
must see. Iris, that yours was an unusual case.
You were mature at eighteen, but I could realise
neither that nor the depth of your feelings. Really,
child, you mustn't blame me too much. We can't

312 THE GREEN HAT

always tell when a boy and gii 1 friendship is
serious ’

" Maurice, why do you lie? I didn’t think you
would he to-night. You knew very well that it
was serious. That was why you made Napier
promise never to see me again. And your son
kept his promise.”

" But why didn’t you come and tell me about
it frankly, Iris? I had other plans for Napier,
yes, but apart from that I was always your friend.
You should have come and told me about it ”

“ Oh, I was proud then ! As I am not proud
now. . .

" What ! ” We started at the odd snap in Guy's
voice. "What, Ins?” And he laughed, desper-
ately, helplessly. Guy ! " Iris, that’s the first

lie I’ve ever known pass your lips. Why, you’re
as proud as an archangel ! ” We stared at him,
somehow staggered by him, as he suddenly strode
forward, the fair, slender giant. ” Just a moment,”
Maurice,” said he, and bent down and kissed Iris's
cheek.

" Oh ! ”

This moment I can hear that despairing cry.
" Oh ! ”

And then she tried to catch back her cry, she
sobbed : “ Judas ! ”

Guy had caught her as she started back from
him like a frightened animal. " Judas nothing,”
he murmured. Her face streamed with tears.
Guy held her, his eyes strangely sad. " Judas
nothing, my Iris,” he murmured. “ You've won,
girl. Go away and play at your lovely game of
love. You've got me again, as you had when you
were a child. I must say I like someone who really
loves and really hates. I’m proud of you, Iris/'

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 313

Somehow, somehow, as Guy held her, Iris’s eyes
looked through the mist towards me, and I moved
my lips to make two words : Saint George. Some-
where in the mist she smiled. . . .

She whispered : " Unfair, unfair, unfair I Guy,
to kiss me like that, sweet, forgiving Guy I Oh,
unfair, unfair, unfair ! And I was so sure I
wouldn’t cry to-night. . .

Sir Maurice was fidgeting with the black ebony
paper-knife. Hilary said ”hm” and blew his
nose. It was very funny now that it was Sir
Maurice who seemed to be alone. I was glad.
Iris had at last been forced to retreat from that
proud battlefield on which she met men on their
own ground. She had made her one gesture of
womanhood; and now it was Sir Maurice who
stood alone. Clever Guy. He was looking towards
the General, smiling. . . .

" Maurice,” he smiled, " the girl’s right. You
were rather a sickening ass. . .

“ My dear Guy,” said the General with a tre-
mendous helplessness; and he smiled. “ How on
earth was I to know then that a boy and gir ”

" Oh, phut ! ” Guy smiled like a boy. “ You
don't catch me interfering with any of my boy's
friendships, I can tell you. Not that I've ever
really thought about these things before. One
just goes driving along never giving these things
a thought until one day we all go off the deep end
just because we never have gnen them a thought,
I fancy Hilary's right about this father and child
business. I mean, people have been having sons, I
suppose, since the year one, and the relation between
them is still a mess. In this century, for instance,
all we people have been bucking no end about
being brotherly with our sons, as though being a
g.h. x

314 THE GREEN HAT

fat -headed brother was any good if you don't under-
stand what the cub is driving at I just thought of
that this very moment. For instance, my boy told
me the other day that Kipling wrote true-blue
miracles calculated to increase the blood-pressure
in men who were too old to fight. I gave him a
thrashing with the gloves for his infernal cheek,
especially as he must have got it out of some book,
for the boy hasn't what you could call a brain, which
is just as well, for it will keep him from going over
to Labour. But, after all, our cubs can't make
more of a mess of everything than we and oux
fathers have done. That's the point to hang on
to."

"Good God, man!" snapped Hilary. "I've
been saying that to you for twenty years, and
you've "

" That's right, Hilary," Guy grinned. " But
you've got a way of saying things. . .

Iris was looking from one to the other of us.
It was as though she was in a dream, looking at
faces in a dream Soft she was now, soft and
white and small. And her eyes were clouds
of blue mist. She stared at Sit Maurice, who
stood fidgeting with the paper-knife. " Maurice,"
she whispered, " good-bye.'

Sharply he looked up from the paper-knife.
He flipped the paper-knife on to the card-table.
Then I saw that Sir Maurice hated his ancient
enemy.

" Good-bye, Iris," he said. " But you must
not expect me to wish you happiness. You have
taken from me my only son."

" Maurice," she said desperately, “ isn't that
special pleaiding ? Haven't you any pity, any
understanding, of what I have been through ? "

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND I 315

" Understanding ! Yes, I have understanding.
Iris. But I can't let it stretch across the wide gulf
that should separate you from my son."

" But you made the gulf, Maurice I You, you I "
She seemed passionately to want his understanding
now !

" 1 1 " cried Sir Maurice " Good God, woman,
I merely parted a boy and a girl But you could
have found each other again — if you hadn't been
you ! I made the gulf ! Iris, did I murder Boy
Fenwick ! "

"Maurice, you take that back!"

“ Hilary, never mind." It was a faint, husky
whisper. " Just don't mind, Hilary." She was
staring at Sir Maurice as at a snake. She was
calm. " Did you say murder, Sir Maurice?
Murder? "

Sir Maurice made the most helpless gesture.
He looked very old. " 1 apologise, Iris, I apologise 1
I take it back completely. I was carried away.
I apologise, child. Of course, murder was much
too strong "

" Too strong ? " Guy echoed softly. " If you
ask me, sir, it w r as so damned strong that it's a
wonder to me that it hasn't blown us all out of
the house."

" I have apologised, Guy ! " snapped Sir Maurice.

Iris was looking at me. She seemed lost in
some thought, she w as very still. Her lips said :
"Dear, take me away."

Sir Maurice darted for his paper-knife, fumbled
among the cards for it, got it, rapped out : “ Just
one moment, Iris. I didn't mean to say that.
You must see that. I apologise sincerely."

" I cannot hear your apology, Maurice. Because
of that gulf "

THE GREEN HAT

3*6

44 I never thought of saying that,” Guy mur-
mured, 41 Damn!”

44 Just a moment, just a moment 1” the General
waved the paper-knife fretfully. 44 Ever since
Napier came to see me this morning I have been
thinking of these things. I saw Venice this after-
noon. She is mad, I think, or enchanted. She
believes in your love for Napier. I can only see
the helpless ruin you have made of my son. And
you say you love him ! Let's forget if we can all
the other men you have 4 loved/ Just take this
one fact. Not two years after parting from Napier
for good, which you say broke your heart, you
marry Boy Fenwick. And when Boy Fenwick
died you yourself said he had died 4 for purity/
What did that mean if not that even before you
married him . . . you yourself, I say, said that
he had died 4 for purity ! 4 ”

44 For hell, sir I That was why Boy Fenwick
died!”

44 Napier I ” There was a long, long silence.
44 Napier ! ” Iris whispered frantically. 44 My dar-
ling, why are you here I ”

” To get you. ...” Napier's voice trembled
pitifully. He controlled it by whispering. 44 To
get you from these . . . men ! ”

44 Steady, Naps l” Guy murmured. 44 We
began the evening by bucking about being
civilised.”

Again, as in the obscure silence of the Paris
night, the white face, the lost eyes . . . facing
us from the middle french-window.

44 Napier ! ” Iris pleaded. She seemed to be
pleading against something which only she could
see in those two dark ruins of eyes. And they
made ruins of us all, those eyes, but saw only one

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 317

of us. And behind his shoulder, in the garden,
pale, wide-eyed, steady as a judgment, stood
Venice. . . .

“ Good God, man ! ” Sir Maurice rapped out.
“ Why bring Venice into this ! ”

“He didn Y t. I came.” And Venice smiled in a
sort of way.

Napier said in a scarcely audible voice : " Let
Venice alone. I think she is my only friend.”
As he stepped into the room Iris made a step
towards him, two, three. Her eyes were dilated,
beseeching. But never once, since the shock of
his first words had turned us to the windows, had
he taken his eyes from his father. The dark,
fevered, lost eyes. He was passing Iris. She
snatched at his arm, pulled at him. “ Napier,
don't, don't. Napier, please, my sweet ! Venice,
for pity's sake stop him 1 You don't know what
he's going to say ! ”

The thin white fingers of the so naked right
hand were buried round the black-covered arm,
holding him in his stride; but still Napier looked
only at his father. His face was so white that we
all looked red and swollen. But Sir Maurice was not
put out by his son's fixed stare. He had his black
ebony paper-knife.

“Well, Naps? What does this mean?”

Iris cried: “Napier I” Then she turned
passionately to Venice. “ Don't you see, Venice !
He doesn't know what he's saying ! ”

“ It means, sir,” Napier said quietly, “ that if
you weren't my father I would call you a
cad.”

“Don’t!” Hilary snapped. “Hm. Run away
now, all of you. Together or separate. Just run
away.”

THE GREEN HAT

3i8

Iris pulled at Napier's arm. He did not see
her. He said very quietly, his voice imperceptibly
trembling : “ Venice and I called after dinner at
Montpellier Square. Venice wished to say good-bye
to Iris. What is between Iris and Venice is their
business. They make me feel a lout, they make
you look like . . . We found Mrs. Oden upset.
She said Iris had come here, and . . .*' His
voice broke, and he passed a hand over his mouth
as though to steady it. He scowled.

Venice, still by the window, was wearing a leather-
coat like Iris's, but it looked much newer and
lighter. She had her hands dug deep into the
pockets. Iris cried : " Venice, for pity's sake
help me make Napier come away 1 Oh, you
don't understand ! He's no idea what he's
saying ! ’'

For the first time Napier took his eyes from
his father. His mouth twitched funnily, and be
scowled. "Yes, I have, Iris. But I want to clear
up this business once and for all. It's gone on
long enough, this — this Boy Fenwick business.
What?"

" But, Napier, you promised 1 ”

He scowled. " I don't care, Iris. I'm awfully
tired of all these pretences. It can't ... it
can't go on, this slandering of you. It can't.
I can't bear it And the first thing I hear as I
come into this room is my father chucking that
slime at you "

“ Napier, don't you see that it's me you hurt,
not them 1 You hurt me deeply, Napier. Listen
to me, my dear, listen ! "

But Napier seemed able to hear nothing, to
see no one but his father. Again he put his hand
to his mouth to stop it twitching. Venice, a flame

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 319

in a leather jacket, suddenly threw an arm round
Iris. “ Darling, darling, darling ! How dared you

come here ! But how dared you ! Oh 1" she

stamped her foot, " these beasts of men, these
beasts, beasts ! ”

“ Venice,” Guy murmured, " take these two

children of yours away at once. Go along

now.”

Napier started at Guy’s voice. He had admired
and worshipped Guy always. Guy smiled faintly,
helplessly, was about to say something when
Napier said bitterly : " Guy, I know it wasn't

your idea to bring Iris down here and throw that
mud at her. I know that ”

“ It was mine,” Sir Maurice rapped out. With
the paper-knife. " And it’s over now. You may
go, Napier. I am asking you to go, boy I And
you. Iris March. You and I, Napier, must part
from to-night. For some time, at least. You will
prefer that, too. You have every right to be angry
with me, according to your lights. I gambled —
for your future, boy — and I have lost. I am not
sorry to have tried. I am sorry to have lost. Now
you may be as angry as you like — but go ! ”

Napier’s voice trembled : “ Before I go, sir, I'd
like to say ”

" Naps, enough of this ! ” Guy snapped. " The
more we talk the worse we make it. Go along,
for God’s sake."

Napier shouted : “ I will not go ! ”

And in the deep, startled silence that must
always follow a shout in an English house, he
said, livid quiet, to his father : “ I’ve ceased to
be a boy of eighteen, sir. And I've ceased to want
to be any of the things you seem to admire. This
last year it has seemed to me that not one of the

320

THE GREEN HAT

things that have made my life as you directed it
have any reality. You've only got to think once
and the whole ghastly pretence of a life like mine
drops to the ground. And I've been trying lately
to understand the point of view that makes men
admirable in your eyes, sir — and I can't get near
it. It seems to mean sacrificing all the things
that are worth while to all the things that aren't
worth while. You sacrificed Iris for what you
call my future, my career. Weigh Iris on one
side and on the other my future, my career, now
that I am thirty 1 You sacrificed my happiness
to the ghastly vanity of making our name some-
thing in this world. You call that * working for
my future/ sir. And I call it the cruel sort of
humbug which has dragged God knows how many
decent people into a beastly, futile unhappiness.
Here I am at thirty, a nothing without even the
excuse of being a happy nothing, a nothing liked
by other nothings and successful among other
nothings, a nothing wrapped round by the putrefy-
ing little rules of the gentlemanly tradition. And,
my God, they are putrefying, and I bless the
England that has at last found us out. And if
they hadn't been putrefying, sir, and if we hadn't
been going rotten with them, you couldn't have
taken advantage of the fact that Iris never funked
anything in her life to bring her down here and

drag her through the slime "

M Napier, you must allow me at least the quality
of patience. My one desire, boy, was to protect
your happiness. I do not take what you say in
the least seriously, for it isn't you speaking but

Iris with your voice. You are enchanted "

“ And I should jolly well think he was en-
chanted ! 99 cried the boy that was Venice, her

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 321

arm round Iris. A warrior was Venice then, and
her leather jacket like a shining breastplate,
“ And I’m enchanted, too — and if you really want
to know what's the matter with the whole lot of
you, you're all enchanted — by the love of Napier
and Iris. I'd stuff all our marriage-laws down a
drain-pipe rather than keep them apart for another
minute. And I think you must be mad and bad
not to see the loveliness of a love like Iris's — and
after all this time she's beaten you all in the end,
and I'm glad, so glad, so glad !"

" Maurice," said Hilary gravely, “ you are get-
ting more like God every moment. You're in a
minority of one."

Napier stood in the middle of the room, looking
from one to the other of us, scowling, seeing no
one, hearing nothing. He was a man lost in an
obsession, trying to find his way out. His back
was to Iris. Some great man, Balzac maybe, has
said that women do not love with their eyes, but
there was a blinding love in her eyes, and her lips
trembled, tried to smile at the lost thing that
Napier was. Only she seemed to know the obses-
sion in which Napier wandered, and she just
managed to say : " Come, Napier. Come. . .

Napier turned to her vaguely, seemed about to
go with her, then pulled himself round to his father
again : “ Before I go, sir, I'd like to tell you — I'd
like to say that — that it was a foul thing to do to

throw Fenwick at Iris "

" Napier," Sir Maurice said quietly, " I have

apologised for that "

“ But have you apologised for us all, sir ? 90
Napier seemed at last to awake from his obsession.
He looked happy at that moment. “ Have you
apologised for the opinion we've all had of Iris for

322

THE GREEN HAT

ten years? Because all these slanders about her
go back to "

“ Napier, my Napier, you please mustn't !"

“ Iris, I must put this right I You've never
had enough respect for yourself "

“ But I have now, dear 1 Let me . . . keep
it. ..."

Napier seemed to appeal to Guy. There was a
curious understanding in Guy's look. He said :
" Go on, Naps, let's have it all now. What's this
about Fenwick?"

“ Guy, don't encourage him ! " Iris cried pas-
sionately. Venice held her tight. Iris looked at
me once just then, and I think that is the last time
she ever saw me.

Napier seemed to appeal to Guy : “ Iris has

always put her friends before herself. And the
only time in her life she ever told a lie we all
rushed to believe her. And that's why Iris and I
never saw each other after Fenwick's death until
three nights before I married Venice. I wasn't to
know then that I was marrying an angel, and so
I couldn't tell her what had happened to me and
Iris. Iris told me about Fenwick that night. I
made her. You see, until then I’d never wanted
to see her, because the Iris that Boy had
killed himself for wasn't the Iris I'd loved as a

But she is now, Napier," Iris whispered
bitterly, “ Why can't you let be, why can’t
you ! "

" Because," Napier flashed, " I love you, and
I’m damn well going to have these people respect
you as I do. . . . That lie Iris spread about the
reason for Boy's death was because she didn't care
what happened to her. She just didn't care. But

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 323

she wanted people to think as well of Boy as
people can of a suicide. She wanted Gerald to
keep his little tin-god hero. And she had it all
her own way because the doctor at the hotel in
Deauville was a friend of hers and let nothing
out. She just didn't care what people thought of
her, and so she said that Boy had died 1 for purity.'
That might mean anything, and so of course we all
took it to mean the worst thing as regards Iris.
Oh, she knew we would. Well, so Boy did die
‘ for purity.' He was mad with love for Iris, and
from the moment she had to give me up he pestered
her to marry him. Then one day she surprised him
by saying she would. I suppose she surprised
him by giving way in the end, and instead of the
cad saying he couldn't, he took her while he had
the chance. He "

“ Napier!"

“ He had s}philis when he married her, and
went mad when he realised what he had done.
That's all. There's your Boy Fenwick. There's
Iris, that's Iris ! " He turned to her blindly. She
was staring, so thoughtfully, at the carpet.
“ Come, Iris. We'll go now. And we'll begin
again from the time you and I said good-bye under
Harrod's."

“ You've taken from me," the husky voice
whispered to the carpet, “ the only gracious thing
I ever did in my life. Yes, let's go."

They were going in silence. Iris had one foot in
the garden when across the silence darted the
neat figure of Sir Maurice. He touched her shoul-
der. “ Iris," he said. She looked round at him
with huge, sleep-walking eyes.

“ Iris," Sir Maurice said. He was holding out
his hand.

3^4

THE GREEN HAT

“ I can’t/' she whispered. “ I've hated you so
bitterly, so long. I can't. Maurice, please don't
ask me."

“ I do ask you, Iris. I beg it from you. You
are good."

Iris's eyes were as though transfixed over the
taut old gentleman's shoulder. Iris's eyes were on
Venice. Napier had touched Venice's hand, and
somehow as he had made to kiss her cheek she
had started back frantically . . . and had in-
stantly smiled . . . brightly. Iris's eyes seemed
to dilate. Then she took Sir Maurice's hand.
“ Thank you, Maurice. But it is Venice who is
good. Venice is good. Good-bye."

They went silently. For a second the green
hat flamed in the mist of the light that fell on the
lawn, and then the green hat was gone. I stared
out into the garden.

I remember a “hm" just at the very moment
when behind me there was a thud of someone
falling, and Guy's murmur : “ Hand me that

brandy, Maurice."

Venice sat very erect in a great leather armchair.
Her eyes were closed.

Sir Maurice darted about. He waved at me
that black ebony paper-knife. He smiled that
ancient smile. " Boy, we shouldn't make
hard-and-fast rules for anyone but ourselves.
And not even for ourselves. Leads to no
good. . .

“ She's all right," Guy murmured to Hilary. De
Travest was one of those men who always know
how to deal with any physical emergency. He
knew tricks. . . .

" Poor child, poor child 1 " sighed Sir Maurice.

" She's all right now," said Hilary. He was

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 325

very white and young-looking, Hilary. Oh, the
hm’s that dropped from Hilary that night !

It was Guy’s face that Venice saw when she
opened her eyes. Suddenly, she was crimson.

“ Your first words should be,” Guy smiled,
" ‘ Where am I? ’ I may or may not tell you.”

" Guy, where am I ? ” She was crimson, like
a child found out.

“ With your friends, Venice, who love you.
And Napier has gone.”

“ But he hasn’t I ” she screamed, and caught
her scream to her mouth with the palm of her
hand. We followed her terrified eyes to see Napier
where we had first seen him that night. He stared
at Venice. And just at that moment the silence
was shattered by the roar of the Hispano. That
shattering roar held us all still, bewildered. From
beneath the trees of Sutton Marie it swept on us
like the roar of a thousand rifles.

“ That car’s gone mad ! " rose to my lips.

I saw Venice bite the back of her hand, staring
at Napier. The roar of the car had held him at
the open window. As he came in Guy spoke
savagely. " Napier, what the hell does this mean?
Can’t you see what you’re doing to Venice?”

Napier said wearily, and he tried to smile, his
eyes on Venice : “ All right, Guy. I thought

Venice was my friend. I was wrong "

" Naps," rapped out Sir Maurice, “ what does
this mean ! ”

As Napier approached near to Venice she jumped
up from her chair and started away from him.

“ Napier, I don’t understand ! ” she tried not
to sob. “Why have you come back? Napier!”

He said wearily : “ Why didn’t you tell me,
Venice? I can’t understand. God knows I’ve

THE GRLEN HAT

3^6

no opinion of myself left, but I'm not such a pitiful
blackguard as "

“ But what is it, Naps ! " And she bit the
back of her hand. " I don't know what you're
talking about ! Why are you looking at me like
that ? "

“ You told Iris, but not me, in case it might
interfere with my happiness ! My God, Venice,
what do you think I am, not to have told me I
Do you think I can leave you when you are with
a child of mine ! Iris said she had promised you
not to tell me, but she broke down at the last
moment "

" But it's a lie ! " Venice screamed. " It's a
bloody lie ! I never told her anything ! It's not
true ! Oh God, it's not true ! "

What was said then, what was done, how they
looked, I can't remember. I remember only that
as Venice sobbed the roar of the car seemed to
lessen. The stork had passed from under the
trees of Sutton Marie, I think Napier was holding
Venice, she was sobbing as though with a breaking
heart. " She's sent you back," she sobbed. “ The
beast, the beast I She's sent you back to show
she loved you more than I do. . . ”

Sir Maurice darted across at me, rapped me on
the shoulder with the paper-knife.

“ Boy, what was that you said about that car
going mad?"

I stared at him. I hadn't the faintest idea
what I had meant. The distant roar still filled the
room like a menace. “ I don't know," I said.
“ Sounds mad. ..."

“ Come along," the old gentleman rapped out,
and darted through the window. I have a con-
fused picture of Guy towering over Napier and

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 327

Venice with a brimming glass in his hand, of
Hilary staring whitely after us. Like a young
lover, I see Hilary at that moment. I caught
the General up as he was starting-off Guy's
car.

“ After her, boy. After her. Feel sick, her
going like that. Feel sick.”

" Can't catch her in this car, sir.”

" We'll see. Try, anyway. Must catch her.
Must beg her forgiveness.” He looked at me
as the car started off. He was smiling. Those
clever darting eyes were vet. Then Hilary, hat-
less like ourselves, jumped on to the footboard and
into the back.

"What's this, Maurice?”

“ After her, man. Iris suddenly thrown her
hand in. Listen to that hell's own racket ! ”

Sir Maurice rushed that ancient Rolls break-
neck up the winding drive. From the distance
came that menacing roar. " Can do seventy-six
if you like,” I heard the husky whisper above the
roar, I saw the dancing tawny curls through the
darkness, boy's head, curly head, white and tiger-
tawny. . . .

“ Can't catch her in this,” I cried again.

Hilary was leaning forward from behind, his
chin by my shoulder. He whispered through the
rushing air : "Afraid of her happiness in the end.
You beat her, Maurice. You beat her, you and
your mouldy old England. And your son wasn't
worthy of her love. Good God, he cared whether
we respected her or not ! She wasn't enough for
him as she was. Maurice, it's on your head, all
this. She'll be in despair. You've got to catch
her.”

We swept headlong round a corner. We were

THE GREEN HAT

328

on the crown of the several small slopes that I
remembered ascending from Harrod's to Sutton
Marie.

“ There 1 " yelled Sir Maurice. And he laughed
like an excited boy. “ We’ll catch her yet.”

Far down the slope, winding, killing the dark-
ness, rushed the lights of the Hispano. Sir Maurice
kept his thumb on the button of the electric-horn,
and we drove headlong down that slope with a wild
cry of warning to Iris.

“ She can’t hear ! ” I yelled.

" Go on, let her know we’re here I " yelled Hilary.

The General’s silver hair waved frantically in
the wind. He was driving like a madman. He
was smiling. The two great lights ahead lit the
country-side. Then they seemed to shorten, and
Harrod’s stood like a pillar of light against the
darkness. The silver leaves, the giant trunk . . .
in the lights of Iris’s car. The stork screamed
hoarsely, once, twice, thrice. . . .

“ Iris 1 ” Hilary sobbed. " Stop her, man !
Stop her 1 Not that ”

" Iris, not that ! ” Sir Maurice whispered.
" Child, not that I ”

I was blind, sick. There was a tearing crash,
a tongue of fire among the leaves of Harrod’s.
Our car had stopped. “ Iris ! ” Sir Maurice whis-
pered. “ Iris ! ” Once again the great tree was lit
by a shivering light, then from the darkness there
came a grinding, moaning noise as of a great beast
in pain. I stood beside Sir Maurice on the road.
At the angle at which we had stopped our lights
did not fall on the throbbing wreck. He was
staring into the darkness.

" But that death 1 ” Hilary stammered. ** That
death I ”

SAINT GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 329

My foot touched something on the grass beside
the road, and I picked up the green hat.

Sir Maurice said hoarsely : “ Chose the only
way to make it look like an accident to those two
children. . . .”

“ Here’s her hat,” I muttered, and as Sir Maurice
turned to it his face was puckered like a child’s.

Suddenly the moaning of the wrecked car ceased,
and in the silence Hilary walked into the darkness
about the great tree.

The end of the romance called The Green Hat.

GLASGOW

W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.

MICHAEL ARLEN

a

'T'HE success of the works of Mr. Michael
"** Arlen has been the literary sensation of the
post-war period. Hardly known before the
publication of “ Piracj ” in 1922, he is now a
Best Seller in England and America, where the
success of all his books has proved astounding.
His books have been translated into several
foreign languages. He is one of the most sought
after, and popular, short story writers in the
world, while The Green Hat has been dramatised
and filmed both in this country and in America
with great success. It is not hard to discover
the secret of his success — he has an unfailing
flow of wit, and a genius for the invention of
fantastic situations, which he owes to his creative
vitality, the highest gift an author can possess.
He is nothing if not provocative, yet those who
most fiercely denounce it, always show a most
remarkable knowledge of his work ! The
extraordinary success of The Green Hat was largely
due to the fact that it was more acrimoniously
discussed than any three other books in
1924.

m

MICHAEL ARLEN

POPULAR NEW 3/6 LIBRARY EDITION

MICHAEL ARLEN

PHENOMENAL success attended the issue of the first
popular editions of “ Piracy” The Romantic Lady, and
These Charming People in the spring of this year. The
Green Hat , which we are publishing this October at 3^6
will be similar in format to the Michael Arlen volumes in
this series already published. They are perfectly produced
in every way, handsomely bound and beautifully
printed.

“ PIRACY ” THE ROMANTIC LADY
THESE CHARMING PEOPLE
THE GREEN HAT

Each with charming and original wrapper designed
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4. The Ghoul of Golders Green
1 /- each. Size, 8x5

MICHAEL ARLEN

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MICHAEL ARLEN

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The volumes are artistically and strongly bound in Rustic
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graph, while the beautifully printed pages with their
ample margins are a delight to the eye.

“ PIRACY ”

Of which over 60,000 copies have been sold in Great Britain
and America.

THE GREEN HAT

Of which over 185,000 copies have been sold in Great Britain
and America.

THE ROMANTIC LADY

Of which over 40,000 copies have been sold in Great Britain
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Size, 6 1 x 4§. Each 7/6

BEAUTIFUL LEATHER EDITION DE LUXE

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MAY FAIR THESE CHARMING PEOPLE

Two Volumes 21/- or separately 10/6 each

MAY FAIR

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Cloth 7/6 Edition

The London Venture is published by Wm. Heinemann, Ltd.

MICHAEL ARLEN

MAY FAIR

Fifth Printing

Being a tapestry so designed as to reveal to
Gentlefolk the Real state of affairs existing
in the very Heart of London during the
fifteenth and sixteenth years of the reigri
of His Majesty King George the Fifth :
together with suitable reflections on
the last follies , misadventures 5 and
galanteries of These Charming
People : the whole written down
by witnesses and arranged
by

MICHAEL ARLEN

What the Press says

Mr. Arlen has invented a new kind of literary cocktail.
— Times.

Heavens 1 What a lot that man knows about men and
women — especially women . — Evening Standard.

Mr. Arlen sees beauty and significance where another
would pass by in indifference and disgust ; he shows us
the romance inherent in the surge of life itself.

— Birmingham Post

Michael Arlen has a fatally intimate knowledge of the
wily ways of women. — Truth .

MICHAEL ARLEN

“PIRACY” 7 f 6 & 3/6

NET NET

Eleventh Printing

This is the story of Ivor Pelham Mar ley , between
the ages of eighteen and thirty-two , and the period
is London, 1910 - 1922 . It is a history of
Hngland , two loves , and an ideal '. Mr. Arlen
deals with all the types of London society ,
and he likes to bring out the queer
and unexpected side of his character.

The sharply-contrasted characters of
his two heroines, Magdalen Grey
and Virginia , Lady Tarlyon ,
are subtly and delicately
drawn.

What the Press says

Vivid, amusing, alive, intensely modern, and intensely
clever. — Daily Sketch .

In many ways this is the best picture given us of any
contemporary English writer of fiction, young or old.
— Observer .

Is extremely entertaining, with an epigram on almost
every page, and a delightful atmosphere on irresponsibility
and freedom. — Daily Telegraph.

His pages are a delight to students of style, his cynicism
is polished, his humour scintillating.

— Edinburgh Evening News.

Certainly Mr. Arlen is an artist. — Bookman .

MICHAEL ARLEN

THE ROMANTIC LADY
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Seventh Printing

These are airy , cynical \ polished inquiries into the
actions and reactions of women's loves , tickling
the reader's sense of humour and sense of style
from the moment he picks up the book , to
find “ The Romantic Lady 99 glancing
down at Noel Anson from her box, to
the last page , where the revolver
smoke is veiling from her
the husband of Iris
Poole .

ip

What the Press says

For sheer wit and cynicism Mr. Alien stands alone.
— Daily Express ,

Pure coquetry, of course, but what perfect technique.

— Evening Standard .

Has all the ironic flippancy of a Schnitzler.

— Sunday Times.

The volume is one to be read by all who appreciate the
literary art in fiction . — S iu day Times .

DATE OF ISSUE

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